Mine Crafting Public Release
Mine Crafting enables your sim to build mines and extract either metals or crystals from them. It adds the Mineralogy skill that allows your sim to smelt valuable purified metal ingots from several pieces of metal at the Mineral Smelting Station, as well as cut gems from crystals on the Archaeology table.
The Mineralogy Skill provides levels 1 - 5, so it's a minor skill (like Bowling). Higher levels of mineralogy skill will allow your sim to extract more resources from the mine each trip. In addition to increasing your mining skill by mining or smelting ingots, there is also a Mineralogy skill book available (Basic Mineralogy). As you gain skill levels, you will find more minerals during each mining excavation.
Mines are built with Mining Charges, which can be bought from the Smelting Station. The Mining Charge is an explosive device that has the same footprint as the Mine itself, so anywhere it fits, the mine can fit. You can place the charge on the ground, then select Build Mine. Your sim will back away from it, it will explode, and a mine will appear.
Mines produce either Crystals or Metals, chosen randomly when the mine is created. There is a chance of finding a large deposit of various valuable Crystals and Metals, after which the mine will return that item exclusively. Both Gold and Silver have been added as findable metals. If you build a mine on Sixam, it will only return Alien crystals and metals. Getting to Sixam is left as an exercise for the reader.
To Extract Metals or Crystals from the mine, you will need a Pickaxe, which can be purchased from the Smelting Station. Your pickaxe will wear out after being used for a while, and you will need to replace it.
Mining has hazards and maintenance requirements of its own, including cleaning debris from the mine, increasing the depth of the mine to access more rare resources (as well as replenish a mine that has exhausted its resources). If you get lucky, you might find large deposits of valuable items like gold, silver or diamonds. If you get unlucky you might end up with a flooded or collapsed mine that you will need to repair.
Clutter and debris will build up over time in the mine. A Cluttered mine will reduce the amount of bonus items you receive, and an Obstructed mine (very cluttered) will restrict the output of the mine even further. Select Remove Debris on the mine to clear the clutter and return the output of the mine to normal.
A mine's resources will become exhausted after a while. In order to extract more Crystals and Metals from the mine, you will need to increase the depth of the mine, found under the mine's Upgrade menu. There are three depth settings, each of which returns a slightly different composition of materials, getting more rare as you dig deeper. NOTE: To extract the maximum amount of stuff from a mine, work it until it's exhausted each time before you make it deeper.
Mining is difficult, dirty work, so your energy and hygiene will decrease a bit faster as you work in the mine. This difficulty also provides a benefit to your fitness skill however, so you become more fit as you mine, as well as increasing your mineralogy skill.
You can sleep in the mine like a tent, as well as wash yourself in an underground spring to improve your hygiene. If you find the Gnome city (see below), you could probably live in the mine full time quite happily, since it has a pub.
Mines can also be explored, with different adventures available in different mines. There are currently four different 'adventures' for mines, and each mine gets assigned one of them randomly when it's created. I may add more, since these were kind of fun in a text adventure sort of way. Your sims can find rewards, including shortcuts to travel to other lots, treasure, and access to new customers for your mining products. Try not to release the Balrog, as it might cause your mine to become haunted...
Smelting
Any of the metals in the game can be smelted into valuable ingots on the Smelting Station. This is mostly meant as a way to provide a bit more income for mining itself, as well as make it more convenient to manage lots of items
Stacks of ingots can be smelted out of 6 items of the same metal.
Gundach Home Foundry
New in version 1.0.7, you can use the Gundach Home Foundry for a quicker, easier smelting experience. It will grab metal ores out of both your own inventory and it's own, so it also serves as a convenient storage container for your metals. It shares inventory with the Gemology Table, so metals added to one will show up in both.
If you have a stack of ingots in your inventory, you can also Break Apart the stack to retrieve 6 minerals of the same type. The actual 'rocks' are returned from this, not a single ingot, since I want them to work in recipes.
Ingots and other mining products can be sold to the Receptionist at the Science Lab, in addition to the other usual ways of selling crafted items. You will need to introduce yourself first. You can get to the science lab by choosing 'Go To Science Lab' under the travel section of your Sim's phone.
As always, I'm happy to hear your suggestions and input! Thanks again!
Packs Needed:
Base Game, GTW, Jungle Adventure, Eco Lifestyle (for the table and the recycler)
(that's probably all of them...not 100% sure)
Change Log:
12/14/2022, 1.0b, Initial Patreon Release
1/2/2023, 1.0.1b, Patreon WIP, bug fixes, 3x faster smelting, additional exploration adventures, consistent behavior on Sixam, price adjustments, clutter changes. Added a bathroom to the pub in the underground gnome city.
2/3/2023, 1.0.2b, Patreon WIP, bug fixes, Added separate Explore adventure for mines on Sixam, balanced mineral output and effects of debris clutter, made effect of finding valuable mineral deposits (gold, silver, diamonds, plumbite) temporary, so that it switches back to Mixed output after a certain number of resources have been extracted (about 6 extraction trips).
6/4/2023, 1.0.3, Public Release, added Break Apart interaction on ingots, improvements to buy/sell adventures, fixed Resume Ingots interaction.
7/18/2023, 1.0.4, Fix for 'aventure_moment' tuning change in Horse Ranch patch 1.99.
7/19/2023, 1.0.5, Removed inadvertent dependency on Apothecary Kit mod
7/21/2023, 1.0.6, Fixed bug introduced by my last fix. Whoops.
3/15/2025, 1.0.7, Added Gundach Home Foundry, Fixed tuning issues with mod's gold and silver, added compatibility with the Gemology pack. If your sim has a Gemology skill of 1 or higher, they'll get the Gemology versions of gold and silver. Also enabled traveling to the Great Underground Empire of the Gnomes from the Forgotten Grotto cave, the Sulani cave and the cave in Chestnut ridge (if you find the map).
7/2/2025, 1.0.8, Patch fix for Enchanted by Nature
11/9/2025, 1.0.9, Adds missing Blutonium ingots, tuning error fixes, shortened smelting time for smelting workstation
Comments (30)
Hi! Absolutely love what this mod does with the Archaeology kit! Would it be possible to create a “mine” custom activity (for venues, small businesses, and clubs) so you can have a working mining lot with employees or a miner club assigned to the lot?
I have something like that working (sort of) in a test version. :) Still working on getting the employees to put the rocks and crystals somewhere specific (other than 'anywhere there's room'). Clubs, small businesses and custom venues (hangouts) all use the same tuning, so once I get it finished for one, it will work for all three purposes. Thanks for the feedback!
Here in Spanish - https://www.patreon.com/JASimmer1/posts/traduccion-al-de-166734677?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
Thanks, I'll include it and give you credit for the translation!
Hello sweetie, sorry if I'm here to break balls on Jan 5 🙈 Dunno if it's a problem with the game language, but I have "Argento" ores (argento is the Italian for silver) from the base game and "Silver" ores/ingots from this mod. The two ores seems distinct; and so it goes, for instance, with gold too: "Oro" in Italian, "Gold" in English. Your Sim can mine base game ores like silver and gold AND mod specific silver and gold ores, or it is supposed that silver and gold are the same entities? Thx very much and many kisses! 🖤
There are two gold and two silver possible. One mod-specific version of each, and the others from Crystal Creations. It sounds like the name of the mod-specific ones isn't getting localized, since I don't think I have an Italian translation of this mod yet. I released Minecrafting before the Crystal Creations pack, and I couldn't bear to release a mining mod that didn't include gold and silver mines -- they seem iconic. So I added custom gold and silver. Then when Crystal Creations came out and included gold and silver, I didn't want to just switch to the game ones, since it would then it would require crystal creations. It's stupidly difficult to detect which packs a person has installed from within a mod, so I decided to go with: - If the miner has any Gemology skill, it should return the Crystal Creations gold and silver. - If the miner does not have any Gemology skill, it should return the custom versions from the game. Unfortunately, you can't make jewelry from the mod-specific gold and silver, but if you have that pack and make sure the sim mining has at least a level 1 gemology skill, they should get the Crystal Creations versions. Let me know if it's acting differently for you! That whole sequence didn't get a ton of testing -- it seemed to work, so I went with it, lol. Thanks for the feedback!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/143650802?collection=1836777
My Spanish translation for the Simsonian Library mod, which you can find on my Patreon.
I've been using the mod and enjoying it. When the mine is flooded or what not, I get no option to repair it. How do I repair it without destroying the mine and building a new one, unless that is what is meant to happen. Thanks!
Sorry I didn't see this earlier. Try the clear debris option. If all else fails, if you have testing cheats enabled, you can shift-click the mine to fix it via the cheat menus. Let me know if this doesn't work! Thanks for the feedback!
I'm using this mod in a new save, and I found an issue with the smelting station in that the sim doesnt finish the task and when you hover over the mold it says resume candle, which unfortunately doesnt work. I'm sure I read somewhere that you were intending to remove the table at some point as the foundry now does it all, so just wanted to let you know there is an issue with it, so I'm using the foundry instead.
I have had no end of problems with that smelting station. In particular, the Resume interaction rarely works. I ran into some of the same issues while making candles on the stock candlemaking station, so it's possible that there are bugs in the stock tuning that I didn't override. In any case, that's why I came up with the foundry last March. I was going to remove the smelting station entirely, but some people have it in their game, so I don't want to do that. If I'm unable to get to the bottom of the 'resume-doesn't-work' issue, I might make it a hidden-in-build-by object so that new users don't try to use it. I kind of liked some of the animations, though, so i keep poking at it to figure out what's wrong with Resume. I'll probably either have it fixed or make it a hidden object in the next version. Thanks for the feedback!
I love love love this!
Just thought I'd let you know your brain is insanely impressive. So happy I found your work!!
Thank you so much!
can children mine?
Well, that's grim! lol. Anyway, I think so? I didn't set out to enable mining for children, but I just looked through the tuning and the Extract Crystals and Extract Metals interactions should both work for children -- because I didn't prevent them from working. So, back to the mines, kids! :D
Do this and JaneSimsten's blacksmithing mod (which also uses ingots) work together? That'd be really fun if they did!
No, but I wish it was easier to get mods from different authors integrated, lol. Their ingots are a different object than these ingots. I should check that mod out again. The rocks you find with this mod should work fine with that mod, though, assuming they used the same built-in collectibles.
Encountered a bug - silver can't be placed in sim inventory, and goes straight to family inventory when collected from the mine. Cannot smelt silver stored in family inventory (Smelting UI will display 0/6 metals). Not sure if this is restricted to silver or applies to all custom metals, as vanilla metals smelt normally.
I'll check that -- I should probably check the gold you find, too. It might be just silver (and/or gold) that's a problem. The base game didn't have either silver or gold, so I came up with custom metal nuggets. Gold and silver were added in Crystal Creations, but I didn't want to make Minecrafting depend on Crystal Creations. Anyway... I'll look at silver (and gold). Thanks for the feedback!
I have a bug, when I want to melt ores into ingots, my sim stops working on it, there is no resume ingot interaction only the candle interaction and it does not work o.o
I've gotten that myself from time to time. Usually if they get distracted while making the ingots and interrupt the interaction. I'm still digging into how to get the Resume interaction to work consistently -- works sometimes, not others. I suspect it has to do with the percentage of the crafting work done, but am not sure.
i just noticed something about the mine charge item in my game. May I suggest not allowing toddlers to handle those mine charges? It's scary to think about toddlers handling dangerous goods in real life. I don't know if they can in the game. But this thing showed up in the Toys category... Oh children shouldn't touch those charges either. These items look a lot like dynamite sticks. So yeah... we had dynamite sticks when I was growing up, but my dad always taught us not to touch them or face severe paddlings.
OMG! Dynamite is not a toy! lol I checked the tuning, and toddlers can't use the Mining Charge. It looks like Children might be able to, though (!), so I should probablly restrict that as a sound safety practice! I think I cloned a toy object to create the mining charge, but I must have forgotten to remove the 'Toy' category tag. I'll put those on the list to fix before the next release. Thanks for the feedback!
Been playing with this more since crystal creations dropped and I am amazed all over again! EA wishes they could come up with gameplay with the kind of replayability that you do so well in your mods. I am currently doing a regency based save and have been having my nobles build mines in order to build their wealth and require them to have more diverse wealth sources. I was wondering would it be possible to add some autonomy to this mod in terms of making clubs of sims that can mine? Maybe there could be an interaction that would allow us to then ask the club members for all their metals and crystals as a way of transferring what they got from the mines? I was also wondering if it would be possible to use the ingots from this mod for jane simsten's blacksmithing mod? No pressure at all and no worries if its not possible. I really appreciate what you have done.
That's a great idea! You could kind of set up a factory lot like in Warcraft, lol. The gameplay you're suggesting is similar to the Archaeological Dig event in the Archaeology Kit, so I know it would be possible. I'll put it on the list of future features to add. I'll need to remember to look up the blacksmithing mod and see how it filters for ingredients. Thanks for the feedback!
You've done it again, I love your mods. I've spotted some mods to translate, I need time to translate them, I'm running the mods section on my own, it's going to take me a bit of time, thanks for sharing. ;)
Thanks!
HAD to become a patreon!! This mod and the apothecary kit are awesome!! Thank you so much!!