Fictional Mines

Researched and structured the same way as a real MineArchive mine page — what it is, where it is within its setting, what was mined, its history and workings — but sourced to canon rather than to historical record. See Fictional for how these are kept separate from the real archive.

A Song of Ice and Fire

• Castamere
  A mine that became a palace, then a tomb, in that order.
• Casterly Rock Gold Mines
  Two versions of the same family secret: one where the gold ran out, and one where the gold was always going to run out first for the family spending it.

Alien

• Hadley's Hope
  One of science fiction's most famous ruined colonies, destroyed alongside its own Atmosphere Processor in Aliens' climax; its now-common 'mining colony' description turns out, on checking, to come from licensed tie-in comics and sourcebooks rather than the original film.

Avatar

• The Unobtanium Mine (RDA ESM 01)
  An open-pit mine whose reserve-replacement problem is the story: the next orebody is under somebody's house, and the company has costed both the carrot and the stick.

Deep Rock Galactic

• Hoxxes IV
  A hostile, cave-riddled planet mined by dwarven contractors for Morkite and other valuable minerals — the entire setting of Deep Rock Galactic, mirroring this archive's existing sci-fi mining-planet entries (Pentarus V, Tyrus VIIA).

Discworld

• Koom Valley
  Every Low King has been crowned on the same rite since B'hrian Bloodaxe — the same king this valley's flood eventually proved had brokered peace with the trolls, not war
• Schmaltzberg
  A mining region so politically central that its own name became a faction: 'Schmaltzbergers' are the dwarfs who still refuse the safety lamp their modernising cousins use
• The Ankh-Morpork Dwarf Mines
  It is never once shown producing any ore, metal or mineral — the whole story that plays out in it is about dwarf law, a murder, and a three-hundred-year-old lie

Doctor Who

• Llanfairfach Colliery
  A pit closed as 'a dying industry' and immediately used as a hole to pour the replacement industry's waste into — with the men who worked it the first to find out what that costs.
• The Trisilicate Mines of Peladon
  A pit dispute in which the owner's answer to a strike is to shoot a hostage an hour, written for broadcast between the British miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974.

Dragon Age

• Ortan Thaig
  The vast, ancient network of dwarven tunnels and abandoned thaigs beneath Thedas, historically mined for lyrium -- the magical resource dwarves and the wider world depend on.

DuckTales

• Scrooge McDuck's Klondike Mine
  The Yukon claim where Scrooge McDuck made his first real fortune, the Goose Egg Nugget — not, as this record's discovery stub had it, where he earned his famous first dime, which he'd already had for two decades by then.

Dungeons & Dragons

• Mithral Hall
  The mine's own name has outlasted at least one dwarf who was believed to have died reclaiming it -- an apparent sacrifice that turned out, as these stories go, not to be quite the end of his story.
• Nashkel Mines
  The first real dungeon of Baldur's Gate, where poisoned iron and a cleric posing as a kobold god start the Iron Crisis.
• Wave Echo Cave
  A mine that was worth killing over twice, five hundred years apart, for exactly the same reason both times.

Elden Ring

• Limgrave Tunnels
  Every sword in the Lands Between is sharpened on stone that somebody dug out of a hole like this one — and the somebodies are still down there, and they do not want visitors.

Fallout

• Quarry Junction
  The NCR's cement quarry on the road to New Vegas, silenced when the Powder Gangers stole the dynamite and deathclaws moved into the workings.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VI

• Narshe Mines
  A mining town that gets into a war because of what its miners dug into — the plot of the game starts with a new shaft reaching ground nobody had been in before.

Final Fantasy VII

• Mythril Mine
  A mine that didn't close because the ore ran out, but because a corporation simply invented something better.
• The Corel Mines
  A coal town whose own coal was voted away by its own residents, in favour of a Shinra reactor that then destroyed everything it was meant to save.

Final Fantasy VIII

• Centra Excavation Site
  A dig where the workers are told nothing, the player is told nothing, and what comes out of the ground is eventually flown over a city to pull monsters down from the moon.

Final Fantasy IX

• Fossil Roo
  A mine you reach by riding a giant insect that steers by being frightened of water.

Final Fantasy XIV

• Copperbell Mines
  A mining company drilling for one more vein and finding, instead, three hundred years of someone else's captivity.

Final Fantasy XVI

• Drake's Fang
  Unlike its four sister Mothercrystals, which rise from open ground to tower over their nations, Drake's Fang is unique in being entirely enclosed within a hollow mountain -- making it, structurally, the one Mothercrystal that really is a mine rather than a landmark.

Fullmetal Alchemist

• Youswell Coal Mine
  A mine whose worst hazard wasn't underground at all, but the man who owned the deed to it.

Germinal

• Le Voreux
  One of literature's most famous fictional coal mines — its climactic flooding, sabotaged from within by an anarchist, drowns or traps dozens of miners in a catastrophe modelled on Zola's own visits to real French coalfields in 1884.

Half-Life

• Ravenholm
  One of gaming's most-remembered levels, 'We Don't Go To Ravenholm...', is built around a former mining town whose zombie-infested streets sit directly over its own sealed mine, which offers Gordon Freeman his only way out.

Harry Potter

• Overlook Mine
  A mine already abandoned for its own reasons before being pressed into service twice over — once by goblin rebels, once by the game's own hidden-journal mystery.
• The Mine's Eye
  A goblin mine turned improvised drilling rig, built specifically to break into a magic repository nobody but its architects was ever meant to find.

Hollow Knight

• Crystal Peak
  The crystals are said to sing, very softly, if you listen — and the miners who once dug them out are still down there listening, or what's left of them is, years after there was anyone left to mine for.

How Green Was My Valley

• The Colliery (How Green Was My Valley)
  Never given its own name in either the novel or its Oscar-winning film adaptation, yet it's one of the most vivid fictional collieries in English-language literature — deliberately anonymous, standing for an entire vanishing way of life.

King Coal

• North Valley Number One Mine
  The camp where the company nailed boards and a tarpaulin over the pit-mouth with a hundred men below, to save the coal from the fire.

King Solomon's Mines

• King Solomon's Mines
  The legendary lost diamond mines of the fictional African kingdom of Kukuanaland, the object of the entire quest in H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel -- arguably the foundational work of the 'lost mine' adventure genre.

Life Is Strange: True Colors

• Haven Springs Mine
  A mine whose real history is written entirely in the two disasters its owner spent a decade trying to hide from the town living right above it.

Metal Gear Solid

• Kungenga Mine
  A diamond mine on the Angola-Zaire border in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, guarded by forced labour, where a squad of Mbele child soldiers was imprisoned and forced to work in 1984 before being rescued by the player character, Venom Snake.
• Mine Base
  A Costa Rican gold mine in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker that is, in truth, a front concealing the assembly of Peace Walker, the game's titular AI-controlled nuclear weapons platform, deep in its lowest level.

Metroid

• Phazon Mines
  The Space Pirates' hazardous mining facility on Tallon IV, built to extract the mutagenic substance Phazon -- a genuine, specifically-named mine central to Metroid Prime's plot.

Middle-earth

• Erebor (The Lonely Mountain)
  A kingdom that lost everything to one dragon, and got it back because of one burglar.
• Khazad-dûm
  Gandalf never says where mithril came from — only that the Dwarves found it here, delved too deep chasing more of it, and lost their entire kingdom for it

My Bloody Valentine

• Hanniger Mine
  The colliery of Valentine Bluffs, where five men were buried by a methane explosion while the town danced, and the one survivor came back with a pickaxe.

Outland

• Con-Am 27
  A titanium mine on Io whose productivity record is bought with an amphetamine that kills its miners in eleven months.

Pokémon

• Oreburgh Mine
  A coal mine whose foreman spends half his week handing out the region's first Gym badge.

Poldark

• Wheal Grace
  Named for Ross Poldark's mother and reopened as a last, desperate gamble that cost his cousin Francis his life before it finally saved the family from ruin.
• Wheal Leisure
  Ross Poldark bet what remained of his inheritance on finding copper beneath a mine his own father had already worked out and abandoned.

Red Faction

• Section 4 Mines
  An already-abandoned corner of the mine that ends up, almost by accident of geography, on the direct route to one of Ultor's power plants.
• Ultor Mining Complex
  The mining colony whose miners, pushed to breaking point by abusive guards and an unexplained plague, staged the uprising that gives the whole series its name.

RuneScape

• The Mines of Keldagrim
  A dwarven king founded the very trading company that would go on to strip his own throne of power, all while a doctor secretly hid away his infant son rather than let the Consortium know the monarchy still had an heir.

Sherlock Holmes

• Crow Hill Mine
  The one Vermissa colliery that would not pay the Scowrers, until its manager and engineer were shot down at the pit head before a hundred miners.

Snow White

• The Dwarfs' Mine
  A mine that exists almost entirely so seven characters can have a marching song.

Sons and Lovers

• Minton Pit
  The pit where Walter Morel hews: 'Minton's knocked off. My dad'll be at home.'

Star Trek

• Gallitep
  A mine whose only surviving physical trace, decades on, was a disease with no other cause — and the moral weight that came with being able to identify who'd once been there.
• Janus VI
  A mining disaster that turned out to have no villain at all — just two species who'd never thought to ask what the other one was doing underground.
• Pentarus V
  The mine that gives the episode its reason for existing is never once shown on screen — the whole hour instead follows Picard and Wesley crash-landed on an unrelated desert moon
• Rura Penthe
  A prison that doesn't need walls, because the planet itself is the cage.
• The Dilithium Mines of Remus
  A mine that exists in its story purely as a place people are sent: never shown working, never measured, and used by both sides of a civil war as the thing they will do to each other when they win.
• Tyrus VIIA
  A mining engineer's maintenance robots turn out to be alive, and Picard shuts down a whole mining project rather than order one to its destruction

Star Wars

• Cloud City
  A gas giant with no solid surface to speak of turned out to be exactly the kind of place worth building a floating city and a mining colony around.
• Spice Mines of Kessel
  A mine whose most famous product — the fuel of the Kessel Run — comes from a fissure so unstable it has to be kept permanently warm just to stop it from exploding.

Stardew Valley

• The Mines (Stardew Valley)
  The multi-level mine beneath the town of Pelican Town/Zuzu City, the game's central resource-gathering location and one of its most iconic features.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

• The Washington Diamond Mine
  A diamond mountain so valuable its owner would rather destroy it — and kill his own family alongside it — than let the world know it exists.

The Elder Scrolls

• Blackreach
  Four thousand years of people opening mines in the same hole: the Dwemer for aetherium, a Second Era consortium for whatever Blackreach would give up, and anyone in the Fourth Era who can work a pickaxe in the dark.
• Kolskeggr Mine
  Seventeen gold veins in one small hole in the Reach, and a family trying to hold it against the people whose land it was.

The Expanse

• First Landing
  A mining claim fought over by its own founders and a corporation that had never set foot there, until an ancient alien defence system made the argument moot for both.

The Hunger Games

• The Coal Mines of District 12
  Where the story's own narrator's father died, and yet the books never once give the mine itself a name.

The Legend of Zelda

• Goron Mines
  A boss fight where beating the monster is also how you cure the friend trapped inside it.

The Princess and the Goblin

• The Goblin Mines
  The tunnels dug by the goblins beneath the mountain in George MacDonald's 1872 fantasy novel, threatening the human miners' own workings -- including those of the miner boy Curdie, one of the book's central characters.

The Stars Look Down

• Neptune Colliery
  Cronin's Neptune: seams under the sea, a fault the only barrier against the flooded Old Neptune, and an owner who strips the coal off it for a coking contract.

Total Recall

• Pyramid Mine
  The sealed turbinium mine on Mars with an alien air-making reactor inside, which Cohaagen would rather keep shut than lose his monopoly on air.

Until Dawn

• Blackwood Mines
  A mine whose own disaster, and its owner's attempt to quietly study rather than treat the survivors, created the very monsters that haunt the mountain decades later.

Warhammer Fantasy

• Zhufbar
  An entire Dwarf hold rebuilt by its own engineers into a water-powered industrial city, proudest of the mine-draining pumps invented there and exported across the dwarf realms.

World of Warcraft

• The Deadmines
  A gold mine that ended up building a warship instead — and, a generation later, nearly finished the job.