It occurs to me that if there's one thing that will drive me from Glitch, it's the amount of pure busywork there is to do. People are already posting auto-miners, and frankly it wouldn't be hard to build (TOS-violating, but invisible) harvest-bots and craft-bots. I think they're inevitable. And the solution is to do what eBay did about auction-snipers: build it into the game.
The reasoning here is manifold.
First: tedious click-click-click isn't actually fun, and it consumes all the attention we might spend in the game.
Second: I do think bots are inevitable, so if it's not in the rules, there will be cheating, and all the acrimony that comes with it.
Third: it distracts from the social nature of the game. When you're doing effective mining, you really cannot be interrupted for that 90 seconds, and it makes it hard to participate in global chat, much less have any kind of social anything going on.
I'd propose either:
* an interface change that allows for larger-scale actions: mine rock away, massage&milk, make a Fecundity Powder (crushing and experimenting as necessary and possible). The only improvement would be over the human delay of going between interface. Energy and time demanded by the tasks themselves would be the same.
or
* a tool that could be added to the economy for different kinds of automation. A jackhammer that is a fancy-pick-until-done, for instance. This has a precedence in e.g. meat collectors.