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Minecraft provides surprisingly many opportunities for automation. Most of them are pretty unintuitive though. A good source on how things can be automated are technical Minecraft Youtubers like ilmango.

TNT is used in farm designs, which generate blocks needing breaking, e.g. wood farms, cobble stone farms, dirt farms. There are two ways to get a lot of TNT for this: a) duping b) building a farm yielding gun powder (generic mob farm, creeper farm, witch farm) and duping or gathering sand

Hopper minecarts can collect items from below a magma block, which allows for easy killing zones in mob farms. Normal minecarts are sometimes used as gondolas for slime block bouncing lifts as the position of a player in a minecart is more accurate on servers. Minecarts can also be used to kill creatures via entity cramming. If there are more than 24 entitities within a block, creatures receive damage until the entity count drops. Once you have an iron farm, the minecarts and tracks become cheap.