Mineral Cleavage — Crystallographic Fracture Planes

Why does mica peel into paper-thin sheets while quartz shatters like glass and halite breaks into perfect little cubes? All three are governed by the same rule — a crystal splits along whichever plane has the weakest row of bonds — but each mineral's internal bonding geometry answers that question differently. This simulator builds a real cubic lattice of bonded atoms, lets you choose the mineral, choose the direction you pull or strike it from, and ramps up tensile stress until bonds start failing exactly where the physics says they should: uniformly on any of three axes for cubic halite, on one weak interlayer direction for sheet-silicate mica, or raggedly and at much higher stress for the isotropic covalent network of quartz.