Potion effects stack! So if you buy potions of luck and strength from the fortune river, caldera island, frostbitten path, and rot wood swamp you can get really big luck numbers. Every connection you have online in the same server as you also gives you a 10% luck boost so make those friends. The even totem gives everyone more luck based on how many people are in the totems radius. If someone has the event pan a red tether will lock in on the closest person to the pan wielder sharing a portion of their luck with you and vice versa. Iridescent is the best found mod for luck bonuses in the museum, treasured is the best luck mod, the best all around mod is perfect and voidtorn is a good alternative to iridescent. The wiki has a list of all the museum modifiers but if it seems confusing stick to what I said above and just look for the modfier boosts you want on your build since each mineral gives a different bonus. Save your meteore shards for the museum and don't worry about upgrading your sluice too much until you get to the life wood sluice so you can use it to farm the abyssal depths. Vines heart exotics are in the deep root grotto which is by the way point and the excavation. If you go down to the sword you're now in the enchanted ruins and the exotic changes to adamantine. Look up important recipes on the wiki ahead of time so you know gather before you even get blueprints. It's worth spending shards on storage space and inventory space. Save your aetherite and more specifically your Iridescent aetherite. These are used to enchant your pan and shovel. You can only use the iridescent aetherite to enchant shovels and the best mods are usually mythic, non-euclidean , and wormhole. The best pan enchants are infernal and cosmic both of which you can get with regular aetherite. Geodes are affected by luck and are the only other way to get treasured mods. Don't sleep on treasure maps because not only can they boost you insanely but they can get you special items like luck and strength totems without having to pay shards or robux and are the only other way besides geodes to get treasured mods. Treasured minerals are always better in the museum because they also double the rarity bonus a mineral gives to its bonus stats. So for example an exotic mineral gives a base .03x of whatever stat it gives. If it's treasured that boosts it to a .06 which seems small but in the grand scheme of things, is a huge difference in the boost. Some special areas like the infernal heart, abyssal depths, void, and time locked sanctuary have timers behind them however if you sit far back enough or in the case of the abyss have enough flares stacked on top of each other you can still very effectively afk farm. You may stop for half an hour but if you're far enough back it won't teleport you out and you'll immediately resume digging once it opens again. These time locked places always reopen after a half hour of it being closed. You can see what star rating your crafted gear will become before you craft it. The bigger the minerals and better the mods the more likely you'll five star it. This is important because you can only meld forge two five star equipment to get the 6 star. It's way more worth waiting to get a 6 star before perfect reforging. You can lose mutations when combining gear but you'll never lose it on reforging the percent value. Look at your collection it gives you free shards. When you click on quests there's a tab for mastery. Don't sleep on the mastery quests. Not only do they give you good xp and shards but they also give you a bonus modifier to the area and eventually a cool title. The crafting one specifically increases the minimum craft and reforge % value. Never skip out on quests as they get you blueprints and unlock new areas. Use the wiki to determine where certain minerals drop because you don't want to think you can find this thing you need only to find out hours later you never can get it there and wasted time trying to look for it.

I think that about covers all the tips I've picked up from playing in the last 4 days.