Description
Although in real life striking a quartz crystal on a piece of steel is just as effective as flint on steel (for making sparks), there seems to be no plan to implement a quartz and steel striker, possibly because gravel (thus, flint) is more common than nether quartz, so it is cheaper to use flint anyway.
-Minecraft Wiki
Screw that.
This mod adds a new item, quartz and steel, and a new block, overworld quartz ore. Quartz and steel is made with quartz instead of flint, and it has 4x more durability than regular flint and steel. Overworld quartz ore is just that: quartz ore in the overworld. However, it's as rare as gold (a lot rarer than nether quartz ore is) to encourage players to still go to the nether for their quartzy needs.
It also has a patch for Sphax PureBDcraft: http://bdcraft.net/community/pbdc-patches-rel/quartz-steel-t1463.html