Unlock advanced mining, processing, and refining for the various ore types. Each resource has a completely unique chain with dozens of byproducts. The more effort used, the more you can extract.
When changing mapgen presets (specifically rich resources, rail world, and ribbon world), the resource frequency/density/etc doesn't change for ores from this mod (and the two extra from pycoalprocessing as well) to match the changes for default ores.