Gem

Gems are the more valuable secondary resource that was typically mined for military production prior to the arrival of tiberium on Earth. Gems were rare and limited because, unlike common ores, they were not spawned from visible mining shafts on the battlefield. Typically they were concentrated in remote areas where civilisation was not strongly present, as here they managed to avoid exploitation.

Gems occured on the battlefields of GWW1 and GWW2, and nearly all of them on the planet had been extracted by the Soviet and Allied war industries by the time of the defeat of Yuri's psychic armies. However, it is believed that Soviet time-travel cheated this fate, allowing gems to be present yet again in a new alternate timeline. However, in WW3 gems are no longer designated as strategic objects on the battlefield and are therefore not extracted by Allied, Soviet or Imperial forces to fund war efforts- this is because mining operations now focus solely on the collection of molten semi-processed standard ore, from next-gen civilian mineral extraction structures designated as 'ore nodes'.