How about an addition from someone who actually...plays Minecraft (me).
Like...the first reblog in particular is just completely inaccurate to the game? The most crucial resources for progression in Minecraft (diamonds, obsidian) aren't automatically farmable at all. The automated farm being described, an iron farm, is highly inefficient in its simpler versions and isn't exactly easy to make for a new player. The purpose of an iron farm isn't efficiency, it's sustainability: it lets you make more iron in the same space rather than exploring outward and expanding your mining activities.
Most auto farms don't include "slaughter machines" either? Like...there's mob farms where you kill zombies, skeletons, spiders and creepers, there's the iron golem based iron farm, and that's about it in terms of farms the average player might want to create.
The automated farms I've built the most are: a sheep shearing machine, sugarcane farm, bamboo farm, pumpkin farm, and kelp farm. I've also built cactus and moss farms.
Not only is auto farming not directly incentivized, it is not at all intuitive to discover or figure out. There's a reason Redstone is somewhat of a niche sub-community within the player community—it takes a ton of effort and experimentation and frustration to learn how to exploit the game's mechanics in order to automate farming, and it is even harder to design a farm that is actually worth the resources you put into building it.
It's straight nonsense to call auto farming a byproduct of colonialism, just as it would be nonsense to call beating Super Mario in the fastest possible time colonialism. Because it is ultimately about two things:
alleviating how extremely tedious it is to grind for resources like cobblestone that are often needed in huge quantities if you want to build something large
stretching the limits of the medium for the hell of it
Like, as someone who does build Redstone contraptions, it is super annoying to see automation characterized as a product of resource extraction as a gaming trope. It is fun to build Rube Goldberg machines and exploit obscure glitches, and it's nice to be able to flip a switch to get cobblestone instead of spending a whole hour just clicking in a gray 1x2 corridor, and to automatically harvest sugarcane instead of harvesting "by hand" and accidentally destroying the bottom block and having to replant again.
The thing that's intoxicating about building more efficient farms is that they're essentially open engineering problems: the mechanics involved are so complex that it's never quite "solved" what the most efficient farm is, and efficiency is a solid metric by which to measure engineering feats. And it's a very fun, neat thing.
The only part of this post that holds any water is the part about Minecraft's empty world you are invited to develop and build upon is a colonialist fantasy, which...is true to some extent, but at the same time, the problem with the colonialist myth of an empty land free for the taking was that it WASN'T TRUE AND PEOPLE LIVED THERE.
If the Americas had in fact been completely empty of human inhabitants, settling there would not have held the same moral implications.
This discussion gives me the same vibe as "cottagecore is colonialist": the colonialism comes from the context and assumptions involved, not from the mere act of wanting to grow food or live in the country. There's no innately colonialist element to building a cottage or exploring a place. I don't really feel that shaping and exploring the world in Minecraft is colonialist any more than bringing something into being in a drawing or painting, or carving a piece of wood, or planting a tree, is.
And I would argue "shaping and exploring the world around you" is part of human behavior throughout history across cultures and is ultimately a good thing—this is how we domesticated plants and animals! how we shaped and tended to ecosystems!
Anyway, this is a bizarre post because there very much are actual colonialist elements to Minecraft. The ways you're encouraged to treat villagers, particularly how you basically have to build a wall around villages to protect the villagers from killing themselves somehow, and otherwise "help" them. More recently in the game, the addition of piglins and bastion remnants introduces a class of still-inhabited structure that you are encouraged to loot and steal from. The piglins themselves can interact neutrally with the player and can be traded with, and they are not undead "monsters" or spiders or slime cubes but Alive Sentient Beings—yet you're still encouraged to kill them. Which is kinda fucked up!
And of course there's a very viable line of thought in how the procedural generation of minecraft makes land an unlimited resource. There will always be more pristine wilderness no matter how much you deplete your existing space.
But bringing up automatic farming (something that exists almost purely as an engineering flex and to reduce grinding) as a colonialist element is purely ridiculous
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