Every locality is a real place — tap 📍 to fly the game map there and see the plots you can claim and mine. Production figures: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (2025 estimates).
Every gem material that is cut or polished — faceted stones ray-traced, cabochons with their phenomenon.
The same mineral looks different depending on where it grew: trace elements, temperature and the host rock change its colour, zoning, habit and glow — and the trade pays a premium for the classic sources. Each of these is a real locality you can mine in the game (tap 📍); specimens found there carry that locality's look and value.
Habit is the typical external shape a mineral grows in — the way its crystals or aggregates look. It helps geologists identify minerals, understand how crystals grew, read the environment they formed in and study how minerals form. The same mineral can take different habits depending on conditions. Every specimen picture in the game is drawn in its mineral's real habit, growing from its real host rock.
Minerals grow from (or inside) a particular kind of rock — its matrix. The host rock tells you how the mineral formed, and the soil it weathers into is what you see on the surface of a plot. Tap a mineral to turn its specimen 360°.
Cleavage is the tendency of a mineral to break along flat planes where the bonds in its crystal structure are weakest; fracture is how it breaks when it has no cleavage. Both are fixed by the atomic structure, so they are key identification clues — and they matter to gem cutters, because a stone with perfect cleavage (topaz, kunzite, fluorite) can split if it is knocked or polished the wrong way.
An ore is rock containing a mineral that can be mined at a profit. Ores are grouped by what is extracted from them (source: gelogia.com, USGS).
How the atoms repeat sets the shapes a mineral can grow. Amorphous materials (opal, obsidian, amber) have no crystal lattice.
Honest labelling matters: these are common treatments, coatings and assemblies you'll meet in the trade.
Rough crystals are solids built from the planes of each mineral's real forms (e.g. quartz {10-10} prism + {10-11} rhombohedra at 51.8° from the c axis, corundum rhombohedra 57.6°, calcite cleavage rhomb 44.6°, zircon bipyramid ~48°, garnet dodecahedron {110} + trapezohedron {211}), lit by a studio environment: glassy stones show internal facets, metals reflect their own colour, water-worn stones are frosted, and striations sit on the faces that really carry them. Specimens are built from the same solids: each mineral's crystals are arranged in its real habit — prismatic groups, radiating sprays, intergrown cubes, plates standing on edge, embedded porphyroblasts, mica books, reticulated lattices, staurolite twins or massive chunks — growing out of (and cut off where they enter) a lump of its real host rock, whose grains are coloured like the rock (pink feldspar and grey quartz in pegmatite, silvery mica bands in schist, rusty limonite in a gossan). Aggregates (botryoidal, druzy, radiating balls, sheaves) sit on that same host rock. Cut stones are ray-traced through real Gem Bot design tables with Fresnel reflection, total internal reflection, absorption and dispersion. Chemical groups follow the Dana/Strunz classes (a few minerals, like danburite and prehnite, sit in different silicate sub-classes depending on the scheme).