For Factorio: 1. Turn off biters (or turn on "peaceful mode", which mostly lets you ignore them until you want to start dealing with them) 1a. Dragon's Teeth wall design 2. Grab one of the quick start mods so you start with a backpack of construction robots 3. City blocks

After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.

Thanks for the tips.

> I've been able to play Factorio like I'm gardening

On gardening, same advice would apply: choosing low maintenance, well fitted with the climate or “tough” species is underrated.

Going only for the visual aspect will easily make gardening a second job. Except it’s an actual living thing, and it’s more pressure than the bullshit deadline we have on our projects.

Ayy, that's fair. The prior owners set things up very nicely, so between that and other things, most of my gardening is "optional", which makes it very very nice; and many of the plants are forgiving / masochists (vines and roses).

Step 1: Learn how to trim new plant (holy crap they're algorithmic fractals!). Step 2: Start trimming new plant. Step 3: Go stare at newly-prior plant a few minutes a day, see how it's doing. 10/10 would recommend.

I think for a lot of games it helps to tune them the way you want to play. For Factorio I like to turn the biters to easy mode, add some convenience mods like ranged grabbing etc.

But after that I like to "speedrun" the game to see how quickly I can launch the rocket. My best time is only about 11-12 hours, so it's far off any kind of world record time, but it makes the game a lot more fun when I have a goal in mind, instead of just endlessly optimizing etc.

I don't know, I would expect turning off biters to make the temptation for hardcore optimization much worse!

They add chaos and something else to focus on and if they're making things too hard then you can adjust the difficulty.

I tried Factorio a few months ago and after my initial shock with the quality of the game being so high, I found myself falling into optimization mode.

And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.

I chose life :)

Nice Trainspotting reference. Very apropos.

I love both of those games but recently took on Dyson Sphere Program after it was gifted to me. I quickly put in twice as many hours as I had in Factorio. There is no combat, it's beautiful, and the blueprint system makes it less tedious. Most of the complaints I have about it are nit-picks and at $20 on Steam, it is absolutely worth the price of admission.

patio11 has done more than one twitter thread about enjoying Dyson Sphere Program.

(it's not sort of my thing but if it's your sort of thing I suspect his endorsement is more relevant)

Huh - I tried and quit before the blueprint system was implemented. Maybe it's time to return...

Whenever I play Rimworld, I turn off invasions and make all of my colonists androids [0]. I just want to build things.

[0] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=13864128...

Depending on what you want to build, have you tried Space Engineers? (Very different from Rimworld, though.)

I have! I love it but it's very tedious. The controls are just much clunkier than Minecraft (for example). It's been a couple years since I played it though, maybe it has improved a lot.

I used to feel that way, but eventually figured out a set of design principles that took care of the parts of the game that were stressing me out. Turning off biters, building with a main bus, making a mall for yourself, and building with extra space so you can hack easily will go a long way to reducing the "ahh I'm gonna have to redesign this whole thing" stress.

Yes with Satisfactory especially. The hard part for me is keeping track of goals. I'll start playing with the mindset of "I'm going to finish this factory" and then I'll run out of resources. So on the trip to get more resources I find 5 other things starting to go sideways so I have to start fixing that instead.

I found that playing multiplayer made that experience much better.

The smaller sidetracks are more satisfying knowing others won't have to deal with them, and if others are doing the same thing they're less frequent allowing you to tackle the larger goals more often.

When I saw the title, I thought it was going to be about Factorio. Bottlenecks never go away, they only move. That's systems engineering.

I tried both of these and had the same response.

Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.

That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft

At least with Satisfactory - there is absolute no rush. No time pressure for any part of the game that I'm aware of.

Now there's always something I want to be doing, but that's another problem.

Factorio feels definitely like this to me.

It's an amazing game. It felt very stimulating the first few hours. Then it became work, and now I don't think I will ever start it anymore.

"'just enjoy it and don't think' is for those who don't understand what a joy it is to think."

If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.

Sudoku is that for me. Feels exactly like work, but perfectly balanced where is hard enough to be interesting and easy enough to be fun.

Sudoku is so one of those fiddly and error prone tasks much better performed by computer for me.

I wrote a computer solver for Sudoku and that was enough for me, I feel no need to ever play again ;-)

I used to feel this way too, but I found sudoku varients a lot more enjoyable. If you look up the YouTube channel "Cracking the Cryptic" they have a lot of different ones.

Yes - after I got bored of regular Sudoku, I found "Killer Sudoku" and I've been playing that variant regularly for a long time. The hard puzzles (blank with no "easy" parts) in the killer variant are quite challenging, and over a span of years I've continued to gain new insights into better techniques for finding the answers. The logical chains you have to build up just to eliminate one possible number somewhere really stretch the brain! More often they're merely tough and I can solve them in one sitting in under half an hour. It's a great mental warmup in the morning with coffee, to get the brain juices going!

That's really cool! And if you are trying just to beat the puzzle it would make sense to automate the task.

I play ALOT of Sudoku and the game now for me is optimizing my own thoughts while I play. Moving from a random search and find function, to a structure queries that solve the puzzles quicker and quicker. Sort of like a rubix cube. I focus on beating my best time and making it easier and easier.

You might enjoy KenKen puzzles as well. They are similar to Sodoku but involve more math. I find them to be very fun, although the harder ones can start to feel like work.

I kinda have the same feeling when speedrunning Unlimited Wordle [0].

[0]: https://tck.mn/speedle