Whenever I would hover over a core sample either in the world or in my inventory, there was a crash attributed to the Immersive Engineering mod. I was a fool and forgot to save the crash log, but it only seemed to happen on some rather than all of the core samples. This is also just since the newest update.

Awesome, thank you so much! I already did get rid of the samples through some Quark iron rod & piston trickery, but hopefully this way I can use the excavator with a little less concern

It's a known bug with existing samples that contain water. Add this to your config folder after you unzip it. That will re-enable the water reservoir, so you can remove those samples in your world.