I like to say that some of us enjoy it because it generates that pride in your work feeling that our actual jobs don't give us.

Seems to me that you're not missing any fun. It's just that the gameplay that fans of the factory building genre find entertaining, you don't. For me it's the fun of an ever growing interconnected mesh of production lines. It's like a series of complex puzzles that are based on how I solved the ones before. And trains... I love trains.

Personally I just can't get into Souls-likes. I've tried several times and none of them have ever clicked for me.

It scratches an itch to find a really efficient way of doing a thing

They're digital crack to a very specific subset of people, haha!

They're definitely not digital crack for everyone. :3

(Personally I bounced off Satisfactory mostly because of the specifics of early game power generation; I really wanted to like it, and might have gotten really into it if it weren't for that.)

-- Frost

Where we get it, they're probably not getting it, is microsteps of gratification for creating a thing, getting it to work, then slowly using a series of things to create a bigger machine that also works. As it gets harder, the accomplishment stacks, you feel good knowing wher every line went and being able to figure out a subtle failure half a level away.

It's not for everyone.

real-time gated games are probably just as grindy. before all these games came out there was a real-time space based game site, now that was a horrid game due to the wait time of building anything.

It's absolutely like work but it's the sort of work I enjoy. For the same reasons I messed with Project Euler years ago, occasionally try to leaderboard during the Advent of Code, or play a CTF from time to time - I find Factorio really fun. It's neat to see how quickly I can whip together a solution, however ugly, then refine and improve upon it. Once the circuit logic comes into play it becomes a lot more like actual programming or scripting.

For what it's worth, IT isn't my day job in any capacity. When I write Bash or Python scripts, Ansible playbooks, scrape webpages or whatever else - it's usually only ever for myself or because I'm keenly invested in solving a problem someone else has presented and that I find interesting. Maybe I'd enjoy automation games less if I had to do the equivalent for work all day, and without any personal interest or intrigue being invested into it. Fortunately, as it stands, games like Factorio exist as extensions of a hobby.

This is probably my favorite non-Factorio-player videos about the game in that he gives it such a really fair shake in spite of it not being a genre he enjoys. There's also videos that cover the general beauty of the game. Growing up on isometric RTS classics, the graphics tickle my nostalgia and the buildings are genuinely mesmerizing. Even the belt splitter animations, which remind me a bit of typewriters, old word processors with automatic return, or dot matrix printers, just look amazing to me.

It's definitely not for everyone but it's one of few "not-for-everyone" games that seems to command a lot of respect even from those who aren't into it. The only others that immediately come to mind would be Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld. Colony management isn't everyone's thing but plenty of people will readily watch 30+ minutes of somebody's custom scenario because the games generate riveting stories. My two cents, anyway.

If I had some pearls I'd be clutching them right now. The biters made you write this, didn't they?

They're all lonely and, yes, a little grindy to me without multiplayer to "show it to someone."

That being said, I may have been burnt out by modded Minecraft when I was younger.