Mining career

It is built for players who want an honest job with somewhere to go, and for a server whose crafting needs raw materials.

Most legal jobs on FiveM servers are a loop of walk, press E, wait and sell. They pay, but nobody plays them for long. Mining was designed around progression instead: what you can dig, where you can go and what you earn all change as you level. The job is also a source of materials for weapon crafting, within the existing limits, so what miners dig has a use beyond the sale.

The job runs in the Davis Quartz quarry, with 25 veins and a site office in the existing portacabin, and in the old mine shaft in the Grand Senora desert, with 36 veins on three depths that open at levels 3, 7 and 12. Twelve ores range in hardness from 1 to 5, so a deeper vein needs a better tool as well as a higher level. Veins are shared server state with stable ids: when one player empties a vein, it is empty for everyone until it grows back a few minutes later.

The office shop sells the next tool once you reach its level: a pickaxe at level 1, a steel pickaxe at 4, titanium at 8, a rock drill at 10 and a hydraulic drill at 14, with a gold pickaxe at 19 for looks. Brighter lamps for the deeper galleries come at levels 3, 6 and 13, a pan at level 1 and a sluice at level 9 handle the washing, and the explosives permit opens at level 11. Drills wear down half a point per chunk and can be repaired. Every level adds one percent to pay, up to level 20 at 8,740 XP.

Every step is a short physical game: the pickaxe, the rock drill, setting and firing charges, panning, smelting and gem grinding. Blasting is where crews come in. A rich vein takes two charges, and the player who fires has to stand 40 to 120 metres away, with nobody, including themselves, within 40 metres of the face. The blast is staged with effects and sound instead of a game explosion, so nobody is thrown or hurt by it, and each extra crew member adds four chunks to the pile.

After the rock face come the stations: the crusher, the wash, the smelter, which burns coal or charges a fee, and the gem grinder. How well a player smelts decides the quality of the bar, and quality decides the price. A copper bar is worth 402 euros at quality 20, 487 at 70 and 558 at 100, and every other bar scales the same way without ever dropping below the value of its raw ore. The smelter panel says it plainly: the better you pour, the more your bar is worth.

The office has an order board with three orders at a time and large contracts from level 15. The mineral book has 35 entries, the twelve ores and 23 rarer finds, so there is something to collect besides money. Up to four players can work as a crew: each extra member who is present adds 3 percent to pay, up to 9, and 5 percent to XP, up to 15.

Hauling is part of the job. A company tipper truck is free from level 1 against a 500 euro deposit, returned when the truck comes back and lost when it is abandoned, and players can buy their own trucks at levels 5, 11 and 17. In the mine, a player suggested bigger carts because walking back and forth with ten chunks took too long. Carts for 15, 20 and 25 chunks now unlock at levels 5, 9 and 14, as new models in the style of the original, and the chute grew from 40 to 50 chunks so two full large carts fit.

The rock, the piles and the loot are server state. Piles are only sent to players within 80 metres, mined ore survives a server restart, and every chunk is credited by the server, never claimed by the client. More than 200 chunks in an hour writes a review entry to the security log, and above 260 the server refuses more for that hour.

The server suite passed 26 of 26 checks, the client 50 of 50, and the interface 709 checks at four resolutions without a failure. An independent review of the code before release found that a restart could duplicate chunks, along with two ordering bugs, and all three were fixed. Testing in game turned up the rest: marker icons missing from their texture file that crashed the game near the quarry, a swing animation that moved the character forward with every hit, interaction icons sitting inside the rock walls and a full cart with no way to drop a chunk. Each one was fixed.