Grain Quarry

Grain Quarry

Region	Drift Network (south wing, Assay Row)
Level range	60+
Boss	Serpentine Colossus
Entrance	Grain Quarry portal, Assay Row alcove (west wall), Drift Network hall
Landblock	0x02E8

Grain Quarry is Assay Row's fourth bay, a realm-copied Lugian quarry worked by a Gotrok Lugian mining crew, where the deep serpentine vein is guarded by something that is not one of the miners.

Overview

Grain Quarry is a single continuous descending quarry room, its floor stepping down across eleven bands from a shallow entrance to a deep working face. It is a Lugian quarry through and through, its own machinery still running: the same deposit-and-pickaxe formations, restocked with serpentine instead of the original ore, and worked by a green-stained Lugian crew. The material only shows itself with depth, so the descent is the point: the shallow bands are ordinary quarry work, and the deep vein at the bottom is where the seam - and what guards it - actually is.

Inhabitants

The quarry is worked by a Gotrok Lugian crew:

• Greenseam Quarrier - the bulk of the crew, spread across the quarry's shallow and mid bands.
• Greenseam Hewer - the same crew, concentrated more heavily toward the deep working face.

The crew's numbers are kept up on their own timers, unrelated to the seam or its guardian.

Harvest

Ulgrath the Grain-Reader hands over an Assay Pick before sending a player down; the pick is a bonded, non-wieldable tool made for working a seam in place, not a weapon. Used on a Serpentine Seam formation, a single swing both frees one piece of Pure Serpentine Ore and consumes the seam outright - there is no repeat mining of the same seam.

The instant a seam is destroyed, the same site produces the Serpentine Colossus: a Golem-bodied guardian standing roughly half again as tall as the crew around it, holding more health and hitting harder than anything else in the quarry. It is not summoned from anywhere else; mining the seam is what wakes it. Killing the Colossus is a guaranteed drop of one Serpentine Heartstone, the item Ulgrath actually wants - Pure Serpentine Ore itself is not a turn-in ingredient, only bait for the fight. Once the Colossus falls, the site goes on a five-minute cooldown before the seam re-forms in its place, ready to summon the guardian again for the next party. Three seam sites work this way across the quarry.

Access

The entry portal, Grain Quarry, stands in Assay Row's west-wall alcove of the Drift Network hall, in front of Ulgrath the Grain-Reader. It requires level 60 and does not open until bay 3's Tourmaline teaching is complete. A return portal named Surface near the quarry's deep end leads back to the hall (a second copy sits near the entrance for an early bail-out). Ulgrath keeps the bench at this bay: he supplies the pick, sets the serpentine task, and teaches Serpentine once a Serpentine Heartstone is turned in.

See also

• Ulgrath the Grain-Reader - the quarrier who arms and teaches at this bay.
• Greenseam Quarrier and Greenseam Hewer - the mining crew.
• Serpentine Colossus - the guardian the deep seam wakes.
• Drift Network - the hall this bay opens off.