Questions regarding settlers

I have two questions regarding gameplay:

1. What am I supposed to do in the regular events on the maps? Doesn't look very helpful to me, I only get some monsters, kill them and then it is over without any progress or something

2. I apparently need to ship value of 100 somewhere but I can't mine anything anymore (only have value of 92) at hand... So will I get more material to mine later or so?