Lode

Overview

Lode is a mineral exploration and mining company theme built around the question a resource investor actually asks: how much is down there, at what grade, and does it pay to dig it up.

The flagship widget is a real three-dimensional resource block model. Twelve drill holes’ worth of assay composites are interpolated onto a graded 3D grid by inverse-distance weighting, restricted to a 70 m search radius so a block too far from any hole is left ungraded rather than guessed at. Move the mining cost, processing cost, gold price or recovery sliders and the break-even cut-off grade recomputes live, recolouring the model between ore and waste in real time and updating contained ounces and strip ratio as you go — the interpolation and the economics are one interactive object, not two disconnected gadgets. Rendered in hand-written WebGL2, no Three.js.

Alongside it, a real drill-hole lithology correlation panel connects matching rock units across boreholes exactly the way a technical report’s cross-section does — a correlation line is drawn only when two adjacent holes log the identical rock code within 25 m of depth of each other, a structural rule the theme’s own self-test verifies directly. A third widget is a Bond work index comminution calculator, sizing a grinding circuit from the 1952 equation exactly as published.

The PHP and JavaScript implementations of the block model run independently and cross-check each other at /technical/?verify=1, in public, in your browser. That cross-check once caught a real bug — an unrestricted interpolation radius that diluted every block toward background grade — documented in the theme’s own CREDITS.txt rather than quietly fixed and forgotten.

The layout archetype is a drill-core tray: a fixed, metre-marked left rail runs the full height of every page instead of a photographic hero.