In modded Minecraft, some of the fancier equipment has very high resource costs. Most people figure out very quickly that manually mining for several thousand iron blocks and hundreds of diamonds is a waste of time, so they learn to instead invest in the automated quarry robots. Later on, when their chests are overflowing, the Applied Energitics[3] "(literal) storage area network" becomes a priority. Some of the more recent mods require things like "8x compressed cobblestone" (9:1 compression, requires 9^8 = 43,046,721 cobblestone) which are so expensive they are not actually possible to make without automation.
Learning to say "lets build a machine to do that" when faced with a repetitive task may be one of the few jobs that exists in the future, and I've seen quite a few youtube videos where people of all ages discovered the lesson on their own by playing Minecraft.
[1] An archetypal example might be Jadedcat's "Agrarian Skies" modpacks ( http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Agrarian_Skies:_Hardcore_Quest ), which are empty "skyblock" maps where you start with a minimum set of items (e.g. a dirt block and a sapling) and grow those into silly amounts of automation that can build just about anything in the game.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
[3] http://ae-mod.info/About-Applied-Energistics/
/* and if you want to take this to a silly and frustrating extreme, try GregTech */