Here is a mining guide for all you beginners out there. First of all you will need a pickaxe.You will have to find out where they are sold in your hometown yourself, however for example in Bastok they can be found in the Port Bastok area, in the same shop as where you can buy a Linkshell. They are probably somewhere around 200g, I suggest you get more than one since they tend to break very fast. Now you need to find a mine. There are various places in the world where you can mine. A few examples are Bastok Mines, Palborough Mines, and Gusgen Mines. There's most likely others, however they have yet to be found.

Ok now that the preliminaries are done I'll explain how it’s done. Go to your item menu and click on the stack of pickaxes and click Use. One of two things will happen, either nothing or a blue arrow will show up on the wall. Walk over to it and click again. Keep in mind that when you do this, if you are facing a NPC or a mob it will target them, and no, you cant mine them :p Your character will then start swinging the pick axe there are a few things that will happen after that. You will either find nothing or you will find something or your pickaxe will break or a combination of them.

When you do find a spot to mine, the pickaxe you use will split from the stack and go to the bottom of your inventory. Also some times you can mine the same place a few times so don’t run off the after the first swing, just use the pickaxe again.

Things you will find in some of the earlier mines are some of the following:

Pebble
Copper ore
Tin ore
Zinc ore
Iron ore
Silver ore

Now I personally toss any thing below zinc since they just are not worth the space they take up in your auction spots and its not really worth selling them to merchants (nothing really is) there are many other ores out there to find so go look I may do a guide later on where you can find certain rare ores but probably not since that would take most of the fun about mining away.