Say a commoner manages to somehow locate a iron vein or abandoned salt mine, and immediately reported it to their lord. Would they be awarded anything for this act? Or would they just be swept aside with a pat on the back?
Has this ever happened before in history that we have record of?
Any answer at all is appreciated!
These kinds of questions likely derive from an "old timey" view of life in the middle ages that you find in popular culture, but its not a realistic picture of how mining worked. "The commoner who pleases the Prince" has a lot of appeal as a story -- shows up a lot in folk tales-- and while one can't say that it never happened, the discovery of a new gold mine by a random peasant isn't something we hear often.
New mines were found only very infrequently before the modern era-- the mines that there were, were in places which had been mined for a very long time for the most part. Mining was a dangerous and specialized skill, and you have people who are miners operating in known territories, digging new shafts.
Regions had reputations reaching back into antiquity for particular mineral resources-- the Romans had prized Dacia for its gold, and those mines were still being worked and expanded a thousand years later. Take the example of Hungary: skilled miners, often German, were invited by feudal lords to move to regions with mineral resources and guaranteed certain privileges and the operation of their communities under German mining law.
In every important mining city there was a Mining Chamber presided over by a state-appointed official, the Chamber Count (comes camerae, or Kammergraf in German: this and other such tides should not be confused with the noble title of Count). His principal function was to collect on the sovereign's behalf the tax on minerals ( urbura ), consisting of a proportion of the metals mined (originally a tenth of gold and an eighth of other metals), and he was thus also referred to as the comes urburae or urburarum
Mining in the middle ages and early modern era was a real business enterprise, very different from the picture you might get in a video game where you "find a mine in the mountains". There was a legal, technical and financial infrastructure behind the mines-- people who financed them (notably Florentine bankers), skilled workers who built the mines, sovereigns who had negotiated "deals" with mining communities over the share of mining production. So the "random commoner" doesn't play much of a role in the development of mining resources in Europe.
See:
Schröcke, Helmut. “Mining and German Settlement in Slovakia, an Historical Summary.” GeoJournal, vol. 32, no. 2, 1994, pp. 127–135.
Arany, Krisztina. “Florentine Families in Hungary in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century.” The Hungarian Historical Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 5–39.
Breitenlechner, Elisabeth, et al. “Reconstructing the History of Copper and Silver Mining in Schwaz, Tirol.” RCC Perspectives, no. 10, 2012, pp. 7–20.
ŠTEFÁNIK, MARTIN. “ITALIAN INVOLVEMENT IN METAL MINING IN THE CENTRAL SLOVAKIAN REGION, FROM THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY TO THE REIGN OF KING SIGISMUND OF HUNGARY.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 14/15, 2011, pp. 11–46.