Three things you need to know to play this game:

1. It starts out as click-to-craft, but automation does unlock fairly quickly for every basic resource.
2. If it looks like your progress is stalled, build items that you have not yet made, even if they don't seem useful - most new recipes/resources are gated behind crafting existing ones.
3. Once automation unlocks, it becomes a game of bottleneck management, because the automated crafting does still require the materials input (with one or two notable exceptions such as charcoal miners). You WILL hit bottlenecks where you run yourself out of a resource and starve an entire production chain and grind yourself to a halt. The "Toggle Auto" button in the lower left hand corner is never explained, but is near-mandatory for progression. Click it to go into management mode, and then click on the automated resource you want to stall production of. The resource background will turn red to show that automation is off. Then click on Toggle Auto again to turn management mode off and return to gameplay. (Repeat the process to turn it back on.)

Bottlenecks will shift over the course of play, as you bootstrap your production in different areas at different rates. Within hours to days, though, you will start crafting Divine Powder, which allows you to prestige after reaching a 50-point threshold. It takes several days to grind out your first prestige -- I recommend getting to 67 powder stacks, which is enough for 6 empowerers and 3 fast forwards -- and then the ability to both selectively and globally speed up production makes a HUGE difference on subsequent playthroughs.

As I write this, I'm on prestige #3, playing a much more intricate game of bottleneck management and still unlocking new objects powered by prestige currency. There's definitely a deeper game here -- and the chance-based bottlenecks of the early game do smooth out considerably (there's a midgame way to generate seeds/apples, and after your first prestige the only truly random element is the absurdly rare drop from the gemstone mining, which I haven't gotten to proc yet). So the game is much more solid and engaging than it looks on first pass.

EDIT: After a week or two of further play I'm dropping my score to a three-star soft rec. While prestiging does unlock new craftables, including the crucial ability to speed up individual items and the nearly-as-useful global speed boost, everything else you can unlock is just the ability to automate production of your automators, the vast majority of which I had to immediately turn off in order not to worsen the game's core bottlenecking problem. The lack of early gameplay balance really snowballs into the late game; it stays fiddly throughout, and toward late game the prices scale absurdly (the ocean costs 400 prestige currency; immediately after finishing it, the city costs 1800, in a game where you can't get over 1000 per prestige without creating the blue potions which require the super-rare Core drops plus aggressive farming of the green potions stuck behind the game's worst bottleneck). The balance issues make it ultimately unsatisfying past the initial rush of discovery; fun enough to play for a while but not to finish.

If the dev is reading, a simple way to help with the core problem would be to calculate income per second for each resource and display it so that you know instantly if a new automation is taking you into the negatives. It would also be nice to be able to sell buildings (even if there's no refund) so that you can fine-tune your automation levels beyond on/off.