Mining, how does it work?

I have a couple of projects on the go right now.

Butterfly singing.  We know that singing to butterflies makes the live longer, but we don't know how much longer.  Right now myself and another Mathemaglitch member each have one butterfly and one milker in our yards and are in the process of determining how many milks a butterfly gives before it dies.  Once we know how many milks a butterfly gives, and whether it is a random or a fixed number, we can try to figure out how much singing expands that number.  Results so far: Butterfly milkers tick once every 24 minutes, generating 10 milks per game day.

Rocks contain 50 chunks.  Well, about one in six or seven rocks contains 150 chunks.  I'll caveat this by saying it's speculation, but at this point it is pretty well supported speculation.  Even though rocks have 50 chunks, you usually get more than 50 chunks from a rock.  That's because the game always gives you the full amount of chunks from the mining action, even if the rock you are mining doesn't have enough.  So each action gives the same amount, regardless of the number of chunks remaining, but once the total mined adds to 50 the rock disappears.  I'll have more information about mining in the near future.

The value of everything.  I'm working on a giant spreadsheet that will let you calculate all kinds of useful things about crafting.  I'm just about to cut and paste all the information about every cooking recipe into it and then I can do some debugging.  After that I'll work on other recipes.  If anyone has any suggestions for how to assign values to elements I'd be very interested.