making cuts?

[LukeMul]

I was watching splitintwos season 4 gameplay and noticed he was clearing out large flat areas of land for mining and i was just wondering how to know where to do this or does it matter? He doesnt seem to be going for specific nodes so how could he make money off it? would it not just be dirt?( side question - how do you guys make money when starting off? I took out a 500k loan and have been able to pay off about 300k from an iron node on minetown but that node is running out so i dont know how else im supposed to make money. Coal doesnt sell for a lot and i seem to find it very slow. Any advice would be appreciated?)

[ZomBeGone]

Early game you can just look for the dark spots where the ore is and dig a hole to determine what the ore is.
To make money there are many ways. early game make sure you smelt the ore to sell it at a higher price. The more processing you do the more the profit. The reality is you can make good early game cash by cutting trees or buying them and processing them into items and selling them. That can raise quick cash especially when you start with almost no money. No loans required.
Also you can dig deeper and get to the pay dirt that returns more profit once you turn it into gold bars.

Mid game and on, you can set up automated processing with belts feeding it and turn to blasting into a mountain. At that point it does not really matter where you dig into a mountain. Blasting and having the rock and ore fall onto belts and get processed lets you make much bigger money. You will get most ores and jewel ore. process those to make more money.
I tend to use the drill, then blast the ceiling falling onto 4 wide belts with roof segments causing the overflow to flow down to the belts like "\____/" then auto process it.

Spoiler: in the current state of the game, the blasted rock can get processed into concrete floors for a huge profit, way more that you get from the ores.

[LukeMul]

thanks for the advice