Excavation

Excavation is mcMMO's "dig and dig and dig" skill. You train it by shovelling up soft ground (dirt, sand, gravel, clay, snow, mud, soul sand and the like) with a shovel in hand. As your level climbs you start unearthing buried treasure (Archaeology), and you unlock the Giga Drill Breaker super ability that lets you tear through dirt at high speed while raining extra drops and XP.

Earning XP

Each excavatable block is worth a flat amount of XP, taken from experience.yml. The block must be on the list below to give any XP at all:

Experience_Values:
    Excavation:
        Dirt: 40
        Mud: 80
        Muddy_Mangrove_Roots: 90
        Snow: 20
        # …full list in experience.yml

Archaeology: digging up treasure

Archaeology is the passive half of Excavation. Every time you dig a qualifying block, mcMMO rolls against a hidden treasure table (treasures.yml). Each treasure entry has its own drop chance, level requirement and the blocks it can come from, so what you can find depends on what you're digging and how high your Excavation level is.

Treasures range from common junk (sticks, potatoes, glowstone dust) to genuinely rare prizes like a Diamond, a Trident, a Cake, or a Heart of the Sea. The rarest entries sit at fractions of a percent and require very high levels:

The full table is large and server-editable; these are just a few representative rows.

Bonus experience orbs

On top of the item itself, a successful treasure roll has a chance to also spit out vanilla experience orbs (the green XP balls). Both the chance and the amount scale with your Archaeology rank:

orb chance  = Archaeology rank × 2   (percent)
orb amount  = Archaeology rank

So at rank 8 you have a 16% chance to also drop 8 experience orbs alongside the treasure.

Archaeology ranks

Archaeology unlocks in 8 ranks. Each higher rank improves the orb chance and amount above; the level requirement to find a given treasure is set per-treasure, not per-rank.

Giga Drill Breaker: the super ability

Giga Drill Breaker is Excavation's super ability. While it's active you get Haste, blocks are dug almost instantly, and every block you tear through is rolled for treasure three times instead of once. The in-game description sums it up as "3x Drop Rate, 3x EXP, +Speed".

How to activate it

1. Hold a shovel.
2. Right-click the air to "ready" your shovel (you'll see "You ready your Shovel.").
3. Left-click a dig block within a short window to trigger Giga Drill Breaker.

Giga Drill Breaker unlocks at Excavation level 5 (Standard) / 50 (RetroMode).

Duration

The active duration grows as you level Excavation:

duration (seconds) = 2 + min(cap, Excavation level) ÷ IncreaseLevel

So a level 50 standard player gets 2 + 50/5 = 12 seconds; a level 100+ player gets the full 22 seconds.

Cooldown

Giga Drill Breaker has a 240-second cooldown by default (Abilities.Cooldowns.Giga_Drill_Breaker in config.yml). There is no maximum-length cap by default (Max_Seconds.Giga_Drill_Breaker: 0).

Tool cost

Activating and using a super ability costs extra durability on your shovel (Abilities.Tools.Durability_Loss, default 1). Holding a shovel enchanted with Efficiency makes the dig speed even faster while the ability is up.

Commands & permissions

See Permissions for the full list and how to assign them.

Quick reference