I guess only some games are amenable to this, but I automated mining in Terraria by just programming AutoHotkey to automate the keyboard and click specific coordinates. The player is always in the middle of the screen, so you can mine specific blocks by just offsetting the coordinates relative to that. So you can mine sideways, downwards, diagonally...

The only issue I ran into was that it was blind and would keep going so I'd look away from the screen and when I came back I had fallen into a pit of monsters or something.