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So, out of boredom and sitting on a full inventory I decided to max out the machine upgrades and wanted to share my conclusions:

It's not worth it - I already suspected that. They do get a bit better, but never good enough to make up for the material invested. Especially since you need gold and Kimberlite and they don't give you that, so you'll have to actively mine anyway.

But I'm not disappointed with the drops, because upgrading was so prohibitively expensive that I was guaranteed to run out of any use for the loot once I was finished!

So there's actually a person playing on an even smaller screen than me! I think your issues with the game window size and the small font are related to that. Having a laptop myself (though with this game the size is alright for me) I can only suggest you try F11 to fullscreen the browser, if you don't already. Removing the header and task bar from view increases the size a lot because they improve the more limiting vertical size.

For the 'not enough going on': yes, I'm feeling the same, especially with all of those gems feeling unrewarding, because there's nothing to do with them. But I think the game is just not finished on these things. It also looks as if there's room for more buildings to the right side.

So, I'm also playing on firefox as a browser and I seem to have the opposite issue: sometimes the drill inventory gets stuck on empty and doesn't fill up anymore unless I click 'collect' on the empty drill. Kind of seems related, so there might be an issue there.

However, good news: unless you're desperately waiting for your first scraps of iron ore, active clicking seems to vastly outperform the machine collecting and the machines are only useful for increasing the passive stone mining in the current version. That's why I fill all slots with drills, because they seem to boost passive mining more than the other types. Once you got the stone rolling from passive and active mining, trading ores for stone and basalt also seem to be solid options. Much better than the machines at least.