Mining

Mining is the act of excavating ore or minerals in the terrain for resources using either a Pickaxe or a Shovel.

Mining
Mining works by equipping a pickaxe or shovel at which point a red or blue transparent box appears under the cursor, which indicates the area that will be mined. When you click an area close enough to yourself (blue box) to mine, the mining animation starts. After a few hits the selected voxel is mined out and its resources are added to the inventory.

Differences between Pickaxes and Shovels
In v0.53 shovels could excavate a large area faster but did not manage to extract much ore from ore veins, pickaxes did not mine as big an area as shovels and did so slower but were far better at getting ore from veins.

As of Beta 0.41, pickaxes are better in every way, so shovels should not be used for mining. (Except for sand, maybe?)