No photo clue here - deduce today's answer from the grid. Each guess you make in your 6 tries is scored attribute by attribute:
- Crystal system
- Strunz group
- Elements
- Named after
✓ exact≈ close✕ no match- no data
| Guess | Crystal system | Strunz group | Elements | Named after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
How to play Mineraldle
Mineraldle gives you six guesses to name one of 777 minerals. The grid is only four columns wide, and two of those columns are classification schemes rather than plain facts.
You get 6 guesses. Each one is scored against 4 columns - Crystal system, Strunz group, Elements and Named after - and the scoring is the whole game: you are narrowing a field rather than naming it cold.
Strunz group and Named after are exact or nothing: the cell turns green when your guess holds the same value as the answer, and stays blank when it does not. Elements can hold several values at once, so it can also come back as a close match: yellow means your guess and the answer share at least one value without being the same set. Crystal system is a family tree rather than a flat list: the same value is green, and a value that sits in the same branch as the answer comes back yellow and names the branch the two share. A value in another branch is blank.
A column the source leaves blank is marked as having no data rather than scored. It cannot come back green for anyone, on any guess, which means an unrecorded value is never a lucky hit - and the gap itself is a fact about the record, so the grid shows it instead of hiding it.
How a round goes
Type a mineral name and the row fills with Crystal system, Strunz group, Elements and Named after. There is no picture, and hardness is deliberately kept out of the grid. Guesses are evaluated on the server, so the page never holds the answer before you finish.
Crystal system is where most players start, because it is a clean seven-way split: triclinic, monoclinic, orthorhombic, tetragonal, trigonal, hexagonal and cubic. Monoclinic and orthorhombic are the crowded ones, so a hit there still leaves a large part of the pool standing.
The Strunz group and the Elements column
Strunz group is the top level of the Nickel-Strunz classification, taken from the leading class number of the mineral's Strunz code. Its ten families are native elements, sulfides and sulfosalts, halides, oxides and hydroxides, carbonates and nitrates, borates, sulfates and related minerals, phosphates and related minerals, silicates, and organic compounds. A handful of minerals carry no usable Strunz code and read as unknown, and the grid prints the family as a short code rather than the full name. Silicates are the largest family in the pool by a wide margin, so a silicate hit is weaker information than a borate one.
Elements is the unusual column. It is a set, parsed straight out of the chemical formula, keeping only valid periodic-table symbols and ignoring counts, subscripts, brackets, hydrate dots and charges. A guess that shares no element with the answer is a miss, a guess that shares at least one is a partial, and only an identical set of elements scores as a full hit. Guessing something with a short formula early is a cheap way to test for a single element.
Named after does not tell you the namesake. It tells you what kind of thing it was: a person, a place, or something else, or unknown where Wikidata records no namesake at all. Person and something-else are near-equally common across the pool, so either narrows the field far less than a place does.
Where the data comes from
Names, classifications, formulas, namesakes and hardness values come from Wikidata under CC0 1.0. The reveal reproduces the mineral's verbatim English Wikipedia extract under CC BY-SA 4.0, with a link to the article it was taken from.
After the puzzle, the bonus rounds work over other minerals in the pool: which element a printed formula contains, which mineral belongs to a named Strunz family, and which mineral was named after a given person or thing. On the rare day when both drawn minerals have a sourced hardness, a fourth round asks which is harder on the Mohs scale. Hardness never appears in the guess grid, and where Wikidata records one it shows on the reveal.
Where the data comes from
Mineraldle is built on one openly licensed dataset, frozen into the game before it goes out. The licence is named next to each one above, and the same list, with the per-record detail, is on the Mineraldle attribution page.
The writing you get on the reveal is english Wikipedia verbatim extract, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is quoted or generated from the source, never written by a language model while you play, and it carries its own credit and licence line wherever it appears.
The pool holds 777 entries and the calendar already runs 777 days, one answer a day, no repeats. That sequence was built offline before release and ships inside the game, so it is the same for everyone and nobody can read tomorrow out of the page. The day rolls over at midnight UTC.
Nothing is lost when a day ends. Every puzzle that has already run stays playable in the archive, and its answer, with the same reading you would have got by finishing it, is published the day after it ran.
Every past answer · Sources and licences in full · Mineraldle on Gamecove
Questions
- Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
- Yes. One mineral a day, the same one for every player, rolling over at midnight UTC. The frozen calendar runs for 777 days, one for each mineral in the pool.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There is no sign-up. Your streak and your stats are kept in your browser's local storage, so clearing site data for the domain clears them.
- Do I need to read chemical formulas?
- It helps, but it is not required. The Elements column prints the symbols for almost every guess you make, so you can work out the answer's chemistry by elimination without ever seeing a formula. A few minerals have no parseable formula on record and read as unknown. Where Wikidata records one, the full formula appears on the reveal.