What about higher level manipulation. Are these made by hand? What does the tooling look like? Can you modify the "maps" using editors, or code? I remember even early on there were Python libraries for manipulating Minecraft chunks.
You usually have items in an inventory. If you have what's needed, you can craft plenty of things by hand (but not complicated things like engines or anything to do with oil or uranium). Otherwise, you build belts to assembly machines, they take things from the belt, and make whatever you tell them.
Mid to late game you also get construction and logistics bots. The former allows you to copy/paste groups of machines (bots will make them), and the latter of which just makes sure you have things that you need in your inventory. Bots speed the game up quite a bit.
