Firts time you return to your ship you get the mining gear. Together with that you get also 4 basic subunits.
put those into the mining laser in the engine room
then you are all set. fly to the debris field right next to the station in Zone "0" and start mining, easily 100k per day, later way more.
And thanks for pointing that out. I added a bunch of helpful comments into the next update to avoid ppl falling into some grinding trap. Also disabled the gambling in the tutorial phase to make even the misunderstanding impossible.
Gambling is nothing more than a quick way to pass time in the bar as QoL.