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Digging is not mining
A block breaking is not the same event as an item arriving in an inventory, and treating those two things as one is how a mining skill can look flawless and still come home with nothing.
In Minecraft, breaking a block does not put its drop directly into whoever broke it. It spawns an item entity on the ground, at the block's position, and that item has to be walked over and picked up like any other dropped item in the world. This is easy to forget because a player standing close to what they are breaking picks the drop up automatically, almost without noticing it happens. A bot that breaks the same block from three steps back — well within reach to swing a pickaxe, well outside pickup range once the item lands — walks away from a perfectly executed dig with an empty inventory.
That distinction is why every mining and gathering skill in Cubelings is scored on a measured inventory delta, never on whether the block broke. "Broke 4 iron ore" is not the same claim as "gained 4 raw iron", and only the second one is worth reporting. A skill that quietly digs without collecting is worse than one that fails outright and says so, because it looks successful right up until someone checks the chest.
What a real trip actually involves
A mining trip sent to fetch iron does not dig straight down — the block underfoot might be the ceiling of a lava pocket or a long drop, so it cuts a staircase instead: a measured run went 15 blocks down in 16 steps, placing 2 torches along the way so nothing spawns in the dark behind it. It checks the tool it is carrying before it swings: mining iron with anything less than a stone pickaxe destroys the ore and gives back nothing at all, so a trip carrying the wrong tool is refused before it starts rather than wasted underground. After it breaks ore it walks over the drop rather than assuming the swing was the whole job, then returns the way it came. Descent, mining and the walk home together take around 160 seconds — 48.6 of those in the descent alone, not because any single step is slow, but because the trip is scored on all of it, not just the swinging.
This is one instance of a broader rule that runs through every skill on Capabilities: report what was measured to change, not what was attempted. See Verification for how the same principle applies to builds, not just survival tasks.