Pickaxe

Pickaxe is a fast digging tool, alternative to Mining Laser and Matter Manipulator. You get a free Iron Pickaxe from Vinalisj when you meet him.

Benefits
When using pickaxes, you don't need to spend rare/costly Manipulator Modules to get a decent mining speed. They are already fast.

Even the cheapest Copper Pickaxe can mine a 3x3 area (while non-upgraded Matter Manipulator only mines 2x2). Carbon Pickaxe can mine 4x4, and Plasmic Pickaxe can mine 5x5.

Pickaxes can mine background blocks with great precision. This is superior to (otherwise) faster Mining Laser, which can't target background blocks directly and will only mine them accidentally (when mining nearby foreground blocks).

Drawbacks
Pickaxes are temporary (they break over time). However, you can craft them with common/cheap materials like Iron Bar or Gold Bar, so it's not a problem to obtain them.

Note: if you dig near the core of the starting Garden planet with a Gold Pickaxe, you will find significantly more Gold Ore than 6 Gold Ore that is needed to craft it.

List of drills
Drills have the same purpose as pickaxes. They only mine 2x2 area, but are faster (0.1 seconds between "mining hits"), so they are ideal for making a two-blocks-wide vertical shaft.