I feel the same. It scratches so many itches. I made the mistake of installing Space Exploration mod after the first run… so many hours invested now.

If the base game isn’t enough to keep you interested anymore because it’s gotten too simple, space exploration is a good hand grenade to mix things up.

This is a very accurate description of how I feel about factorio. Thanks, I'm going to use this going forward.

Yes, it's like a distillation of the feeling I get from the most enjoyable parts of my job, risking productivity loss from real world responsibilities until the complexity rises high enough to require project organization and advanced planning of tasks that are the least enjoyable parts of my job, along the lines of:

"Crap, I have a sudden urgent need to deal with enemies creeping out from beyond my radar range that will push back operationalization of my proof-of-concept production pipeline. I'd estimate 3 man hours are required to perform a one-off fix on the enemies & radar expansion, maybe 5 to automate long-term... damnit I need a break, let me VPN into work to decompress from Factorio stress."

And so if sales are biters, where do lawyers rank?

I haven't played Factorio but this article GIFs helped me understand it, at least from a high level simplistic perspective!

I think most of programming is just logistics: moving data from one place to another, picking and choosing what fields to use for a given purpose and then calling a function with those selected parameters or talking to another system.

I am working on a number of experiments in this area. I'm working on a programming environment which is unlike programming languages where you specify instructions and the state is implied but you work directly with state and instructions are implied.

The problem with nodal editors is that they're not very information dense.