> I'm having serious problems with the sandstone caves. I've done the whole jumping off the min cart and back on it thing once, but i guess i need to do it twice because it i can still hear it rumbling. The only thing is that i can't find it the second time. I've tried several times to make a map of the mines, but i can't seem to do it. I think the 3D aspect of it is too much for my tiny brain to cope with.

Erm, and of course today is the day I leave the notebook with my map at home...

Since I don't have the map in front of me, I'll at least try to help you visualize it. There are 16 rooms in the caverns, and four levels stacked on top of one another - four rooms on each level in a square formation. All the rooms "line up", although the paths are confusing. (Example: if you drop down the hole in the northeast white room, you'll land right below it in the northeast yellow room.) White level's on top, with yellow below it, then red below that, and finally black at the bottom.

I drew four planes hovering one over the other (like shelves), each one with four dots where the rooms should be. I then connected the dots with the directions you could go, marking what direction they represented (North, South, East, West, NE, NW, etc.) to keep from getting confused.

You can get down to the southwest black room (where the railway can be reached) in about eight moves without having to drop down through any holes. I don't have the map in front of me so I don't recall the path, but I know you pass through two white rooms, two yellow rooms, two red rooms and then two black rooms (in that order) before you hit the railway. I think the key move to get down there in time is to go west from the northeast red room (where, I think, you got the nanoxite stone). You're going to avoid the room where the miner was stuck completely.

> Also, i only have 2 nanoxite stones, and i need 4, right? Are they both after the bit i am stuck on, or should i be looking somewhere else?
> I can't remember where i got the 2 i have from (it all seems so long ago...)
> i've read as many old posts as i can find on the subject, but i still seem to be getting no where.
> Any help would be good, blatant spoilers would be better ;)

Only two of the nanoxite stones can be found in the mines. (You got one from helping Cortez, and dug one up in the sandstone caverns, right?) The other two you'll have to acquire elsewhere. (But since you need Verna's passcard indirectly to get what you need to trade for one of them, you've gotta catch that cart.)

-Mandi
(half an hour til I can go home... yay...)