This mod adds several components including an array of gems, tools, and armor and some nifty machines. Using the machines you can refine the raw gems mined from the earth, or sift through dirt, sand and gravel to find the bits of metals and gems hidden inside.

The gems:

Turquoise - Lowest tier. Makes tools that are about as effective as wood.

Onyx - Slightly better than Turquoise. Twice the durability and a mining level equal to that of stone tools

Amethyst - Twice the durability of Onyx.

Citrine - Twice the durability of Amethyst.(Seeing a pattern yet?)

Emerald - Twice the durability of Citrine. Can be used to make a hammer that mines a 3x3x3 cube.

Ruby - Twice the durability of Emerald. Can be used to make a hammer that mines a 5x5x5 cube.

Sapphire - The most rare. Has a durability of 4096(Twice Ruby). Can be used to make a hammer that mines a 7x7x7 cube.

Each gem has a complete set of tools and armor that(when crafted with refined gems) comes pre-enchanted.

The machines:

Sifter - This machine can sift dirt/gravel/sand/soulsand, their dense counterparts, and their loaded counterparts and produce bits of gold, iron, diamonds, and other drops. This includes gold, iron flakes, and diamond chips.

Pressure Vessel - This machine runs on blaze fuel and can smelt down the metal flakes into nuggets, as well as melting down the diamond chips to form whole diamonds. In addition this machine can smelt that extra armor one gets from looting dungeons and killing mobs down to get the resources back out of it. Currently only supports vanilla armor/tools and Resource Engineering armor/tools that are undamaged.

Gem Tumbler - This machine is crafted from the sifter and turns unrefined gems into shiny refined ones. Put sand or gravel in the bottom slot to act as grit and watch as your dull gems become shiny and refined, ready to be used in crafting.

Fracking Machine - This machine smashes apart cobble, netherrack, endstone and sandstone to find the tiny bits of useful materials hidden inside. This also supports the dense variants of the resources.

Compressor - This machine takes a stack of a resource and compresses it into the dense variety. This works with cobblestone, endstone, netherrack, soulsand, sand, dirt, and gravel. Each operation takes 200 ticks, and costs 400RF/tick.

Now you may be wondering what the dense variants are and how to get them. Wonder no more:

The Thors Hammer and the Chunk Hammer are the answer. The Thors Hammer will mine all of the ores out of a chunk when activated. If you have a chest in your inventory it will place it down and put as many of the ores into it as possible. It will then shove what it can into your inventory before dropping any remaining ores on the ground. The Chunk Hammer is an upgrade that will mine the entire chunk and attempt the same drop operation. Chest>Inventory>Ground. Both hammers will attempt to craft down any redstone/lapis/diamond/coal that it mines into blocks to reduce the number of items being spawned. The Chunk Hammer will also craft down cobble/sand/gravel and other common blocks into dense variants. These can be uncrafted at a ratio of 1 dense block > 64 block.

A word of warning: only vanilla stone is supported at the moment. Other types of stone from such mods as Underground Biomes are not currently supported, and will throw many stacks of items at your feet. Use caution when preparing to mine with these tools. The Thors Hammer *might* cause a few ticks of lag even on a world with many ores in the ground. In such a pack, use the thors hammer on a chunk prior to using a chunk hammer or you could lag out the world for up to a minute or so. Performance issues related to the chunk and thors hammers have been found and fixed.

If you have any suggestions or feedback feel free to leave a comment or find me on IRC at #ResourceEngineering on esper.