I'm going to just skip the first 50 pages of stuff and go into my mini-post. You may want to look at my alchemy post which details some interesting stuff for all craft systems, including some mining mushrooms!

Mining, I actually live around an area that has a lot of open mining areas, we call them quarries. So it's not underground, it's above ground which is safer, and this is where you can get things like large crystals and quartz, umm also bits of precious metals like to follow veins of quartz. For mining above ground they actually use pressurized water hoses because the stone is just so hard that you can't use a pick axe. Like I tried once, I didn't even dent the rock, and the experienced miner looked at me and laughed a little. Now in mining areas, the professional miners would leave trash rocks behind, because they were more interested in the precious metals in the rocks, and they weren't interested in the geodes, or crystals. A geode with crystals in it actually looks 'flea-bitten' it has a lot of holes in it upon examination, the more holes the higher chance of some beautiful crystals inside. So in truth for above ground mining operations where people just want some 'easy crystals' they might have better luck foraging or collecting for geodes, and then working at breaking them apart (that's the hard part, because you can really just shatter the crystals inside if you arn't careful enough, as will dropping or smashing the rock also risk damaging the crystals inside. It actually requires a gentle tap but if you whack it too hard everything inside will be broken) Then you could gem polish those crystals for practice, and carving them up before moving onto diamonds or something more rare and precious.

Now these crystals are actually believed to have magical powers, able to focus your soul, eliminate bad chakra (karma), I thought it might be interesting as focuses for elotheans, and possibly all of the classes to eliminate some of the bad in their abilities. As maybe a ritual focused jewelry power. Just thoughts.

Crystals tend to vary in color, but it's only by site so if your in a site where the crystals are clear or they might be a little smokey that's all your going to find there. You won't find pink, or blue, purple because the coloration comes from the other minerals that sink into the crystals when they were created.

So they have a rock museum at one of the mining areas, and they were selling mexican geodes which actually are basically amethysts, but they were all small egg-shaped geodes and the color range was from clear to light purple on all of the ones I bought and opened. The larger geodes were already opened and professionally polished and cost way more than I make in a typical week.