Well done. You got a lot of different systems working well together, pop ups, an inventory system, questing system, a little minigame (the analysing), all this makes the game more varied, and fun for longer. The long comment is cuz you're destined for greatness, and I wanted to help. (or something a bit less dramatic)

But after I had submitted my first couple of orders and ran out of crystals and had to go back to mine more, I knew exactly what was going to be waiting there for me, and so got bored and decided to write this comment instead. In my opinion there's two way to fix this, or a combination of both.

1. You could make more required steps before looping back to the first. Like in the beginning of Minecraft where you have to first chop wood, then craft tools, then mine stone, then search coal and iron, then craft a furnace and smelt the iron, continuing until you beat the game, or build a nice house or something. Like sure each step is kinda boring, they're all different though. This takes a considerable amount of development time, considering that they have to make new systems for each part of the game.

2. As an alternative you could put more time into making the steps that you do have more deep, adding more features that make the step more varied, making the step more replayable by adding skill expression. This way you can let the player enjoy the same step for longer, which is effecient with development time

I'm not saying you guys should have put in more effort into your game, it's a game jam and you don't have infinite time. But I am gonna say that for your next project I'd spent more time on option 2, instead of 1, because the game has a lot of things now that feel like they were more work to make, than fun to interact with. Like the different crystals for example. I as a player don't really care whether it's a ruby or an emerald. I would have preferred they were all the same if it could spare you the development time to make the difficulty of analysing the crystals slighlty randomised, or something like that.

As another example, imagine if the analysis minigame popped up during the mining instead of first mining everything, then analysing everything. I think you will agree that would make the mining AND the analysing more varied.

It's also completely valid to almost exclusively do option 1, if that's your style and preference, and it can also be really fun to just make some game systems without thinking to much about optimal time management.

Okay, I just read your reactions to other comments and it seems you wanted to add a shop and upgrades to the game (which is a good idea, and would have made the game a lot better), and ran out of time. Maybe you've realised this yourself already, but if you don't know if you'll have enough time to implement all that is necessary, you should prioritise what is most essential to the fun of the game. When I make a game, I always actively work towards the feature in the game that I expect to make the whole thing fun. This is really hard though, and I also mess it up all the time, and it's also strangely specific to game jams in particular. When working on a larger game, the problem isn't nearly as big.

game is super cute and i enjoyed getting the different crystals, very nice :)