It sounds like you may be confusing "mineral" and "chemical element". Minerals are regular arrangements of compounds of elements. It is enormously easier to get

It sounds like you may be confusing "mineral" and "chemical element". Minerals are regular arrangements of compounds of elements. It is enormously easier to get progressively heavier (or extreme in any other sense) synthetic minerals than to synthesize new elements. Synthesizing new minerals require arranging existing common elements in new ways; synthesizing new elements requires extreme high-energy physics.