As you might expect from a pirate game with ship-building elements like Skull and Bones, precious metals are an extremely valuable commodity. During the early game of Skull and Bones, you’ll start off with a great need for Iron, but that quickly turns into a demand for Bronze, which is made by using Copper.
Bronze Ingots are a requirement in dozens of crafting recipes that pop up as you begin to establish yourself as a bonafide pirate. As such, you’ll need to know where to find Copper so you can harvest it. You’ll also need to know what to do with it after you’ve added the ore to your inventory. Below, you can see exactly where to find Copper in Skull and Bones.
Finding Copper in Skull and Bones
There are a few different locations across the East Indies that allow you to mine Copper, but the best spot is just south of the Sacred Tree outpost. The Sacred Tree is located along a narrow canal near the Hova Hill spot west of Sainte-Anne. South of the outpost, you can keep following the canal to reach a trading settlement and a couple of guard towers.
Around these guard towers, you can find a couple of Copper ore veins along the shoreline. One of the spots is on the right side of the towers while the other is in between them on a small island. You can see both locations in the map screenshot below:
Before you start mining the copper, you will have to own a Pickaxe I. This is made at the Carpenter’s shop in Sainte-Anne for two Torn Sails and one Broken Plank. Once you have your Pickaxe, you can go up to a Copper ore vein, which is indicated by shiny rocks along the shore, and press the “Harvest” button that appears on the screen.
This leads to a small mini-game where you need to press a button when your pickaxe lands in the green zone. However, I suggest just turning on the “Auto-Harvest” option in the settings, as this makes harvesting much faster and eliminates the mini-game altogether. Unfortunately, this does mean you get fewer resources. If you want the true Skull and Bones experience, you can leave Auto-Harvest off and loot your materials the old-fashioned way.
In any case, once you’re done mining a Copper ore vein, check to see if there are any more near the one just mined. If there aren’t, then try to find another or simply head back to Sainte-Anne to take your new Copper Ore deposits and turn them into Bronze Ingots at the Refinery shop.
The Refinery makes Copper Ore into Bronze Ingots for a small fee. You can have the Refinery make as many Bronze Ingots as possible (three Copper makes one ingot) and once they’re done, you can loot the finished ingots from the “Finished Goods” tab in the Refinery menu.
If you want to make a new ship or craft some new blueprints, you’ll need quite a hefty amount of Copper and Bronze Ingots, so I recommend making several trips to the ore veins south of the Sacred Tree.