In minecraft, if you wanna mine some iron, you punch a tree, use the wood to slap out a wooden pickaxe, grab some stone with it, then make a stone pickaxe, and you can mine it.

In vintage story you can't mine rock until you have a pickaxe, the lowest level of which is copper. You have to knap stone tools from rocks you find on the ground, and you can't make wood into planks until you have a saw (also needs metal). To get started with metalworking you have to explore and find copper bits sitting on the ground untill you have a lot, make crucibles and molds out of clay and fire them in a pit kiln, burn wood into charcoal in a pit (because wood doesn't burn hot enough to melt copper), and then you can melt and pour your copper into a mold. Do that with a pickaxe head mold, put it on a stick, and now you can mine stone. Then go find some more metals and do that some more because to mine iron you actually need a bronze pickaxe.