A Gold Mining Mod.

Now, I get that it sounds a little vague, so let me clarify...

It would be a mod where you would craft equipment to effectively mine dirt, sand and gravel that would then be fed through other equipment that would 'wash' the materials to free gold dust, gold nuggets, and gold chunks. Then you could use a common furnace to smelt the gold into ingots and then craft it into gold blocks. There could even be an industrial furnace, that smelts like three different things at once.

Gold dust could be combined at a ratio of ten to one with a craft-able, reusable stone bucket to make a bucket of gold dust, which could then be smelted into a gold ingot. There's already a crafting recipe to take gold nuggets and turn them into an ingot. The gold chucks could be in a 2x2 crafting recipe to make ingots (four chunks to make one ingot).

The whole point would be to sell the gold blocks to make some imaginary currency to use to upgrade your mining equipment, your washing equipment and even your furnace to produce more gold.

The wash plant would have a specific percent on the return of the starting material and how much of and what kind of gold produced. Like a 10% chance that a single sand block could create gold, while a 50% chance of making gold dust, 25% chance of becoming gold nuggets and a 5% or less chance of making gold chunks. Then better percentages for dirt and the best for gravel. And with higher 'levels' of wash plant, the percentages would be even better.

Stone would be used to make some of the basic equipment while Iron and diamond would be used to make the best.

Of course, in the beginning you would be make very simple equipment out of wood and stone and as you get more 'currency' by selling gold blocks, you can use it at some NPC to buy the rights to make better equipment, or buy necessary parts that you can't craft to use to craft better equipment. There could even be a fluctuating value on the gold blocks, so you could choose better times to sell your gold.

I could very easily see this working with a version of Tale of Kingdoms or Millionaire, since they both have a currency system already in place.

I know this is rambling on, but after watching Gold Rush on Discovery Channel, I've really wanted to see a gold mining mod that could give you as close to the same experience as what they go through.