Now that you now have a copper pickaxe head on your pickaxe, and have a smeltry up and running. You need to level up your mining level again to be able to mine tin and zinc in order to make bronze or brass. In the mean time I am going to discuss Tool modifiers and tool leveling.

How tinker's has been setup allows you to make some really powerful tools. This is because of what is called tool modifiers. If you looked at your tool stats you would have noticed a stat named "modifiers remaining" 

These modifiers can be used for all sorts of things like:
-auto-repair(requires)
-faster mining speed
-sharpness
-extra durability
-auto-smelt
-fortune
-silktouch

to figure out what each of these require and what else is out there, I recommend looking into the in game book: "Materials and you: Volume 2"

Just so you know the material stats listed in the previously mentioned book are wrong.

To apply a modifier I am going to demonstrate how to add fortune to your pickaxe.

To add a level of fortune you are going to need 450 lapis(or 50 blocks of lapis)(not all modifiers are this expensive). Take your pickaxe and the lapis to the tool station and put them in like this. 

{"image":"fortune.png", "scale":-1}

Pull the pickaxe out of the tool station. You will need to repeat this multiple times. After applying all 450 lapis you will have fortune 3.


I didn't mention earlier that there is another leveling mechanic on your tools, but this level applies to all tool types. Leveling up in this manner will give you free modifiers and extra modifiers. You can level up your tool 15 times, but for each new level it requires 1.3x as much xp

