I built a small catalog of ore deposits primarily by hiking deep into areas of the US mountain west that no one has gone into, albeit not for the purposes of prospecting. There is still quite a bit out there. Mostly gold-copper ores in my case.
You'd be surprised how many of us actually have a mining claim or two ;)
This is not to assume that the parent commenter invested for this reason.
In saying that, a lot of the stocks I purchased over a year ago peaked about 3/4 months ago but have had massive sell-offs since. Still trading above what I paid so I'm considering doubling down on some as the timeframes to production are still years out.
And I get your lack of confidence, I did miss some quick opportunities that I felt were there but I wasn't confident at the time.
The only way to really gain confidence is do your research; read the presentations of each company, particularly their JORC-compliant estimates, time frames to production, how far along the funding path they are, etc.
Use your preferred LLM for deep dives. Whatever you're question, just ask and you'll be surprised at what you learn. For example asking for a cost/effort comparison of the metallurgic processes required for each type of rare earth host material really helped me understand what they were doing, and how each company differed in their approach.
If you like learning random things on Hacker News, deep diving into any technology or industry will not be an issue.