Beginning in 1618, the government on an almost continual basis organized expeditions to the Urals and Siberia to search for ore deposits. Also, the practice of issuing permits was used, which made it possible to search for ores throughout the territory of the state.
In the 16th-17th centuries, primitive blast furnaces were built by peasant families in the forests adjacent to their villages. The resulting metal pieces were processed into iron in forges or sold. It is known that 40 years before the arrival of Georg Wilhelm de Gennin to the Urals, the peasants of the Aramil settlement smelted iron in small furnaces and sold it, paying tithes to the district office. Even at the beginning of the 18th century, the smelting of ore in small blast furnaces was widespread in many regions of the Urals. In 1720-1722, the artisanal farms of the Kungur district produced 3 thousand poods of iron, 203 poods of strip iron and 897 poods of other varieties. Subsequently, artisanal metallurgical production was legally prohibited on the initiative of G. W. de Gennin.
In the 1630s, with the involvement of foreign engineers, the construction of arms metallurgical factories began in the central part of Russia. Despite the construction of more than 20 state and private factories in the central region in the 17th century, the country experienced a shortage of metal and continued to buy it abroad. In 1629, 25 thousand poods of iron bars were bought in Sweden. To meet the needs of the Ural and Siberian enterprises (primarily salt-making) and settlements settled by Russians, iron was purchased in the central regions. At the same time, the cost of the metal increased sharply with the distance to the east due to transport costs. The impetus for the development of the Ural industry at the beginning of the 17th century was the plans of the authorities to create metallurgical enterprises in the eastern regions of Russia. After his trip abroad, Peter I, realizing the shortage of coal in the central regions and the need to strengthen weapons potential, ordered the construction of mining plants in the Urals, providing them with engineers from Tula, Kashira and other factories. The Ural factories were built on the model of factories in central Russia, which, in turn, were created using the French, German and Swedish types. The rapid development of the metallurgical industry in the Urals in the 17th-18th centuries was facilitated by the abundance of rich natural alloyed (copper, chromium and vanadium) ores in the region, as well as the availability of accessible forest and water resources. The lack of railways led to the development of a large number of small mines. Iron ore reserves were considered practically inexhaustible, while copper ore reserves, on the contrary, were quickly depleted, which led to the closure of 40 copper smelters in the Western Urals in the late 17th - first half of the 18th century.
In the absence of their own specialists in mining and metallurgy, craftsmen were invited from abroad, but they worked mainly in the central regions of the country. In 1618-1622, the Englishman John Water, and in 1626 Fritsch, Gerold and Bulmerr, together with Russian attendants, carried out fruitless expeditions to search for ores in the region of the upper Kama and the Pechora. Others such as the Bergman brothers also unsuccessfully searched for ore in 1626 in the Cherdyn region. Only in 1635, the Saxon, Aris Petzold, and the Moscow merchant Nadia Sveteshnikov found two copper deposits, which became the basis of the first copper smelter in the Urals - Pyskorsky. Failures of geological exploration expeditions at the beginning of the 17th century forced the state to weaken its monopoly on exploration for non-ferrous and precious metals. Major rewards were promised for the found deposits. This decision was followed by a series of discoveries of new deposits of copper and iron in the Urals. In particular, thanks to local residents who brought samples of bog ore to the offices of the Turin and Tobolsk governors for a fee, the deposits of the first iron-making plant in the Urals - Nitsynsky - were discovered. In the 1670s, the expeditions, not finding ore in the Penza district, began to advance to the Urals and found silver ores along the banks of the Kama, Yayva and Kosva.
Government incentives for the found ores led to a sharp increase in exploration activity in the Urals. In the second half of the 17th century, the focus of the search shifted from the Kama region to the Verkhotursky district, where a number of large copper and iron deposits were discovered. In 1669-1674, the state organized an expedition to the Trans-Urals to search for silver and gold ores. During the expedition, no suitable ore was found. Rich ores were found only at the end of the 17th century far beyond the Urals, in the valley of the Argun River, on the basis of which, in 1704, the first Russian silver-smelting Nerchinsk plant was launched.
In general, the Ural metallurgy in the 17th century did not go beyond the limits of artisanal production, the central regions received greater development during this period.