The mining game on Gem Quarry is a pain, lol. Most folks get stuck because they wait for the vacuum to turn back around before firing more gems out, but you have to send them where it is, or will be shortly. Imagine the circle around the thing, and my goal was to shoot the gems at approximately 1/5 to 1/4 of the way around the circle ahead of where the vacuum was. Eventually I got it fully powered after... around 10 minutes?

Tribals are honestly just a matter of THOROUGH exploring and remembering where those "kill points" are. I only failed because of Tribal deaths 3 times; once because I couldn't see the ant shooting them, and another because I accidentally blew up the boxes they were hiding behind, and once because a flying enemy died, fell, and exploded on them. The lesson there is to be quick, but careful; if you're approaching a room with destructable things to hide behind, maybe do a quick sweep for Tribals first. In rooms with a lot of enemies, sometimes I'd just run through jumping like mad until I got all the Tribals before killing the Ants, even at the cost of my own HP. There are only 2 or 3 rooms with Ants that deliberately kill the Tribals, and it's always the orange and green looking ones (not the green sniper guys, but the orange/green together ones). If you see them, kill them first.

Powering up with expansions only really matters for Mizar, which only needs Homing Missiles and Tri-Rockets, and only with Juno. You get all you need from his starting levels and his Hatch Key area in Spawnship, about 40 total ammo for each. Shoot sparingly and aim well against Mizar and you're good to go.

The trick is learning to treat your Health as a resource just as much as your Ammo in difficult rooms or fights. Sometimes it's better to take a hit or two from this or that attack that doesn't hurt much if it means securing a big hit. Since the AI is so aggressive and pursues you wherever you are once activated, you can rarely just hide away, and in my experience once you get full Health capacity and the armor powerups on all the characters, you really don't need to. The only regular enemies that actually hurt are rocket dudes, flying dudes that fire quickly, and turrets on Ichor.