Fictional Commodities

Commodities included here have a meaningful relationship to mining or extraction within their setting — this is not a general database of fictional substances. See Fictional for how these are kept separate from the real archive.

Discworld

• Schmaltzberg Fat
  Its own myth of origin is a fifth elephant that fell off the back of the World Turtle and crash-landed on Überwald

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VI

• Magicite
  The strongest magic in the world is only ever produced by a death -- an Esper has to stop living before its power can be taken and used by anyone else.

Final Fantasy XVI

• Crystal
  A resource so essential to daily life that a government's claim to legitimacy rests substantially on control of its own Mothercrystal -- and so essential to the plot that its true purpose turns out to be a slow-acting engine of apocalypse.

Middle-earth

• Mithril
  It was worth ten times its weight in gold while the mine was still working, and 'beyond price' the moment it stopped

Red Faction

• Noachite
  A resource canon cares about entirely as a plot premise — the reason Ultor is on Mars at all — and almost not at all as a material in its own right.

RuneScape

• Runite Ore
  Dwarves mined runite for centuries thinking it was worthless, right up until someone finally thought to smelt it together with a completely different ore.

Star Trek

• Dilithium
  Whether it's a scarce resource worth fighting over or something you can simply synthesize has changed as the franchise itself has aged
• Latinum
  It is currency specifically because a replicator cannot make it — the one thing in a post-scarcity economy that still has to be dug up

Star Wars

• Coaxium
  The fuel of the Kessel Run is mined from a fissure so unstable it has to be kept permanently heated just to stop it exploding on its own.