Videogames

Fictional mines, commodities and disasters whose setting began in videogames, grouped by setting. Each record is researched and structured like its real counterpart and sourced to canon; see the Fictional section for what that means. The full lists across every medium are Mines, Commodities and Disasters.

Mines (27)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pokémon

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

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.

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 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 Legend of Zelda

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

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.

World of Warcraft

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

Commodities (4)

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.

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.

Disasters (5)

Final Fantasy VII

• The Corel Reactor Disaster (Before the story's present; exact date not given on screen)
  A disaster with two separate villains — the reactor that failed, and the company that burned the survivors to cover for it.

Final Fantasy XVI

• The Fall of Drake's Fang (878 (five years before the main story's present day))
  A nation's entire war effort, and the career of the man who had made himself its indispensable economic advisor, both ended in the same few minutes -- and five years on, Valisthea still isn't sure who was actually responsible.

Life Is Strange: True Colors

• The Cover-up Blast (28 April 2019)
• The Haven Springs Mine Flood (Roughly eleven years before the game's 2019 present)
  The cover-up of this disaster, kept intact for roughly a decade, is what Typhon later kills Gabe Chen to protect — see the Explosion and Cover-up Blast, below.

Until Dawn

• The Blasting Crew Disaster (13 December 1951)
  The disaster that, through Bragg's secretive handling of its survivors rather than the cave-in itself, actually created the monsters the rest of the story is about.