Yeah, it's certainly not for everyone, but I can explain why I like it. In short: My brain likes to design systems. The prospect of accomplishing a clear goal

Yeah, it's certainly not for everyone, but I can explain why I like it. In short: My brain likes to design systems. The prospect of accomplishing a clear goal with an unclear path is something I find naturally enticing, as I automatically start to anticipate ways to accomplish that goal, but then I find theoretical problem with those ways, which makes me want to play the game to see if my mental model is correct. Sometimes, I'm just playing the game for hours because I really want to see if the design I came up with would work. Basically, Factorio gamifies the process of building systems, where you have to progress through multiple roles such as gathering resources yourself, building the factories that produce the resources you need, and then being an architect for your factory at a large scale, all while defending against the threat of the "biters". In every stage, I often feel like I'm in a trance like state, where I'm almost playing multiple games at once, trying to anticipate the long-term ramifications of my immediate actions, while balancing that with the need to get something working quickly. Basically, to me, most of the game doesn't occur on screen. It occurs in my mind, as I try to design and optimize lots of different things, in a very similar way to the programming I do for work. So, I can totally see why that might not be appealing to you, but I hope that helps you understand what I find appealing, and I hope others can chime in with their experiences :) Edit: I also never really focus on the numbers directly, and I try to focus more on the rough proportions, because I find the game has a great system of not using up resources unless they're needed, so I'm okay with overproducing in certain ways. Taking the game too seriously can be tempting, but I do stop myself from micro-optimizing everything, and I focus more on just accomplishing something that's "good enough".