2 ideas to reduce botting
Curio collecting bots:
Remove pearls as a curio. increase the study time of the other rare curios. For example floatsams to 12 hours, bluebells to 48 hours (LP/Hour could stay they same).
what does this do? for people who do not bot, these curios are still rare and it will be hard for them to keep them constantly in their studies. For people who do bot they will have so many of these curios that they wont be able to study them quick enough to the point that they will likely reduce the amount they bot them because there is no point in having 10 cubbords worth of curios that will take 3 months to study.
Essentially the lesson is making the rarest curios also the fastest to study heavily promotes botting. So you just need to make the rarest curios also the longest to study and the problem goes away.
Food making or eating bots:
Make so drinking water or getting hurt does not increase hunger and make so everyone gets hungry at the same rate even when offline. at the moment this game is online even when you arent, but we dont get hungry unless we are online which is counterintuative. You could make it so that in 96 hours you would go from full to starving. You will likely have to give up on the idea of characters starving to death to make botting food worthless. Making these changes would make food quality outway quantity and would make botting food/eating would not be nessessary.