It is placed like a Proximity Sonic Mine. It has the same ability as it has in the main series of the games it appears in. When one or more zombies get close to it, it explodes and deals 175 damage to all zombies caught in the blast radius, with damage fall-off applied at distance.
The Potato Mine's weakness is that it can be detonated prematurely by zombies by shooting at it. It takes 30 seconds to recharge one Potato Mine, and the Cactus can hold up to three at a time (four in Battle for Neighborville).
In Garden Warfare 2 it has a Rux exclusive bling variant named the Pizzazzling Potato Mine. Like most of the bling variants however, the Pizzazzling Potato Mine is merely a bejeweled reskin of the default Potato Mine, and as such functions identically.
Potato Mines force Zombies to look down. If a Zombie sets foot on a Potato Mine, it will explode and they will experience the full force of a "SPUDOW!"
Pizzazzling Potato Mine
Need some more shine in your life? These potatoes love to pizzazle zombies, and will leave a cloud of glitter after a whopping sparkling spudow!
Battle for Neighborville
Plant a highly explosive mine.
Associated upgrades
Spud Spotting
● 2
Potato Mine displays health bar of nearby enemies to all allies.
Popcorn
● 4
Randomly creates Potato Mine near enemy if vanquished by max charge Spike Shot.
Has 75% chance to spawn Potato Mine near the enemy.
Strategies
With
A good strategy is to hide it in a place that cannot be noticed or to put it near a narrow passage with Tallnut Battlements covering up the rest of the space.
Another strategy is to deploy a Potato Mine in the center of a zombie summon point (a dirt pile with bones in it). The Potato Mine will be camouflaged (since the grave pile glows from the zombies' point of view), making it hard to see it. When a zombie walks near the summon point, the Potato Mine will detonate.
Another strategy often involves putting Potato Mines behind Tallnut Battlements placed in doorways and corridors to block zombie movement. When a zombie destroys the Tallnut, it leaves a dust cloud behind itself which many Cactus players hope will conceal the Potato Mine long enough to make the zombie step on it. This is because most zombie players simply move forward after destroying a Tallnut Battlement, making them susceptible to the above.
One more way is that when you fight a zombie one to one, you might want to place a Potato Mine right in front of the zombie, letting it step on the Potato Mine before the player (or AI) gets to react.
Against
If you are on zombies, there isn't really any way to be signaled when Potato Mines are near. If you are in an area that has been mentioned above, look cautiously, mostly on the ground. If you see a Potato Mine, shoot it from a distance until it is destroyed.
It does not need to arm before rising from the ground.
However, upon deployment, there is a 1.5 second delay during which they cannot detonate, but are invulnerable to attacks as well. This is to prevent the Cactus from using it as a close range instant-kill attack.
Destroying it rewards the attacker with ten coins.
Getting blown up by one also counts as the player destroying it, thus yielding 10 coins.
In the sequel, destroying them provides experience points.
Its light no longer flashes, most likely because it would be too easy for zombies to notice it, especially in nighttime maps.
As the zombies, it is possible to vanquish a teammate by detonating it when they are close to it. This often happens by accident in crowded spaces.
The same can also happen if the player stays too close to the mine as someone destroys it or if the player's teammates are too close when the player is killed by one.
In early Beta (due to a bug), vanquishing a teammate by detonating it would count as an assist for the Cactus that deployed the mine and as a vanquish for the zombie that detonated it and sometimes vice versa (assist for the detonator and vanquish for the Cactus).
In early beta footage, up to ten of it could be spawned. Their damage was possibly weaker then, possibly to an equivalent of that to the Potato Nugget Mine.
It looks like the ones in the original Plants vs. Zombies but have eyelids, look around and have black pupils/white eyes.
If a Potato Mine is placed on an object that is able to be destroyed (like a Tallnut Battlement) and the object is destroyed, the Potato Mine will float in mid-air. It will still explode when a zombie is near, and is still able to be destroyed.
This also applies to its variants.
Note the counter saying "4"
In Garden Warfare 2, there is a glitch where the counter on the Potato Mine's ability icon says that the Cactus is holding four Potato Mines, instead of the regular three. This, however, is purely cosmetic.
In Battle for Neighborville, Cactus is now able to properly store 4 Potato Mines
