Nothing Is Forever: Hints

• The clues are the wordplay parts of cryptic clues.
• The number associated with each clue is the answer's length.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Some of the clues (such as the first and the last) seem to have a fairly clear way to get an answer, and the answer gotten thus is of the right length, but it's not a word.
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Those non-word answers are correct. The next hint gives the answer to the first clue, to give a starting point. If you haven't solved that clue, you can skip the next hint and consider some other answer you have solved instead when reading the following hints.
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment and can be skipped. The answer to the first clue is cop + pr = coppr.
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. How might that answer be the correct answer to a clue?
• This hint very strongly clues an aha moment. Are there any words similar to that answer?
• This hint gives away an aha moment. Each answer is a word with one letter removed.
• In fact, the answers have an even more specific form.
• Each answer is a mineral (rock or metal) with one letter removed.
• The answers are in a particular order.
• The answers are in order from softest to hardest. This might help in getting missing answers.
• How might clue/answer extraction work?
• Some of these minerals don't seem to have exact integer hardness on the Mohs scale, and some have hardness greater than their length, so indexing by hardness probably won't work. (Indeed it doesn't.)
• What's a really simple thing you could do?
• Look at the missing letters in given answer order.