It’s funny because I don’t enjoy Factorio for the same reason you do - it quickly feels like work - but I never get the feeling I could be doing something more productive instead. I just think the core gameplay loop of Factorio is tedious and that it’s specifically designed for people who don’t mind that.
The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen.
What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.
If you're looking for more novelty, there are a lot of mods that add cool new complexities.
I like the Seablock pack - the core premise is that you crash land on a water world, and need to extract all your resources from water. The production loops are much more complicated (you start having to deal with byproduct management just an hour or two in), but in return there's almost no enemy time pressure. It also includes some ingame recipe-planner mods, so it's easier to plan-then-build.
The core gameplay loop is still very much the same. More complex recipe is not really a more complex game. It just means more of the same planning and calculation but with more variables - which is to say more tedium not more fun.
The gameplay is fun at first. You have a ressource and something you want to produce. You look at the ratio of things, what the layout you will have to put in place, how fast things will have to move. You painfully build that. It works. You feel good. Then you realise it will just be more of the same ad infinity with the first time you do train design and liquids the sole inkling of novelty. It’s all fairly simple conceptually so it gets tedious and boring quite fast (at least to me). I think part of the issue is also that I tend to play it wrong by calculating and planning - literally work for which the in game tooling is not optimal - while I think I would have more fun just winging it and fixing things as they happen.
What I mean is I think it’s not a game for everyone but I can see why it’s catnip for its intended audience.