Mine cart tracks

[FadedSpirit]

Does anyone know the optimal length of the mine cart tracks? The guy said the longer the track the better, but I'm assuming there's a limit to it.

[Asschen-Sukar]

The little cart that brings you your ores will need to ride the entire length of the track, then return to the mine, before production starts up again. I suppose for every tile there's a chance of x ores, a gem, or nothing to spawn. So, your bottleneck is either the time you want to wait for the ores to be delivered, or the amount of world tiles you can place. I doubt there's a hard cap to the length of the track, unless you're talking the total tile cap, which the devs said is 2500. So, no worries there.
The optimal strategy for the mines is to feed a bunch of winterberry tarts to a mine, then return after a good while. The mine will produce once for every tart you give them, and you don't need to come back every time; they will simply repeat the process until they run out of tarts, so to speak. You may want to delay doing this until after you've unlocked gold and silver, as it seemed to me the mine only started producing gold and silver ores after I unlocked them. You unlock these by progressing the story.
The only real use for the mines, in the end, is to enable you to more easily craft expensive items that you can sell, so you have enough money for the 500 coins needed for the main quest, the 1000 or 5000 you need for achievements, or to buy ingredients for crafting and cooking (looking at you, horse hair and wire).
I think that's about all you need to know about the mines.

[CatPerson]

The length of the track only dictates how many ores per cart are produced. Thus if you put only a Start Mine and End Mine together, you will get ... one ore per cart trip, with what I assume is a small chance of two or three ores.

Increasing the odds of higher tier ores etc. is probably the factor of Tart vs. Muffin, but no one knows what the odds increases may be.

I have settled on 8 track tiles. I've stood in front of the End bin for 30+ minutes doing nothing but eating and drinking while waiting and the cart always dumped 3 ores (the seeming max). It's possible only 6 or 7 tiles would largely achieve the same thing tho, I haven't tested. Longer just increases cycle time for seeming no gain.

I agree that what ores mines produce seems dependent on what you've unlocked in the game to that point - this also seems to apply to crates and barrels, when certain ores, gunpowder etc. start spawning in them. eg, some things aren't added to the potential "loot pool" until you've unlocked them in game.

[CatPerson]

Postscript: oh, I suppose Tart vs. Muffin could be only how many cart trips you get for each one and not quality? I never tested Muffins for that. Tarts to my memory = 4 cart dumps per Tart.