Overseer's Spade (Patreon)

Wondrous item, uncommon

This golden shovel is miraculously resistant to impacts and scrapes. As an action, you can touch the tip of the shovel to a patch of loose earth within 5 feet of you and speak its command word. When you do, you can magically excavate up to a total of eight contiguous 5-foot cubes of loose, nonmagical earth, starting from where you touched the shovel. It takes 1 minute for these changes to complete. Any dirt or stone removed in this way is destroyed, leaving behind any loose metals or gemstones within the excavated area. The shovel can only remove up to eight 5-foot cubes of earth in this way each day.

The overseers were privileged. They didn't know how to hold a pick or where to swing it. But they had ample gold to make up for it, and in the end, that's all anyone cared about.