izigame.me

Probably the best base building game I've played.
For me this is more fun than stuff like Rimworld as it's more of a sandbox rather than having artificial events pushing the gameplay, the things that drive the gameplay are the in-game systems. It shows how well balanced and interesting the systems are that all my hours in this game so far are on a single save. I think I'm fairly close to the end game at this point but tbh it's fun to just tinker with stuff, there's no particular hurry to finish.

As the game unfolds you get different phases where you'll have a particular problem you're trying to solve. These can range from pretty simple things like having food, toilets and building materials but as time passes all of your actions have side effects - breathing uses up oxygen and makes unbreathable Co2 which then starts to clog up your base so you have 2 new problems that need solving without even doing anything - getting rid of Co2 and getting more oxygen! The same applies to toilets - they produce waste products and sinks need water but produce dirty water which again you need to handle the waste and deal with getting more of the useful stuff. These engineering problems often have simple short term solutions but need more complex fixes to make sustainable systems and the game is basically solving these problems until you get new problems! You then end up having to refactor your early heath-robinson solutions when you get better technology and have available time. The late game becomes about trying to do goals that the game has set for you - launching rockets and building a massive statue! That's the bit I'm playing at the moment but I'm currently sidetracked with a big mining/refactoring project as my base is basically a maze of little rooms and the dupes spend too much time running about rather than actually getting work done so I'm moving stuff out of the way to put in a big central corridor and hopefully get some transit tubes in. I'm also considering partitioning it so that rather than having everyone in the same spot it effectively becomes several smaller bases with more specialist purposes and some automated conveyors to move stuff around.

I've never really played anything like this before, clearly it's in the colony sim genre but IMO it's such an original take that's is basically out there on its own. It's far more interesting and complex than the systems in Rimworld but actually well put together unlike Dwarf fortress. The automation is complex but makes sense and works without adding dodgy scripting languages - it's all components that operate in the world and can mostly be understood without reference to a wiki (having said that I am a programmer so your mileage may vary), unlike the mad (and practically indecipherable) stuff you get in mindustry (which is a great game tbf but I didn't find trying to use automation to control things in it fun, it just felt tedious).

It's really refreshing to play a game that isn't about combat/killing stuff as well!