Same, it just feels too much like I'm at work. It's probably fun if you're a full time streamer because then it is your job.

You definitely need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy them. I used to be, but not anymore. Now I feel myself getting older and more frustrated with every new recipe I have to automate to get closer to the actually fun parts of the automation games.

I love the automation but holy crap do not make me make 20 steps of 20 different widgets just to make one thing, that is the most frustratingly dull form of making things expensive to craft in any factory game. Just add more expensive materials not 20 unnecessary interstitial crafting steps

i loved terraria too. especially the base building part of it. you could get super creative with your bases if you wanted. i had a beach base with a lighthouse, ferris wheel & submarine. a jungle base on stilts. a cemetery base with a big skull, a cozy Christmas snow castle base, a cave base with glowing orbs, lava, and a robot, etc

satisfactory took all that to 11 for me. instead of bases it's factories and it's a beautiful hand-crafted 3d world, instead if 2d pixel graphics. i had a lot of fun building so many cool things there. my last play through was 840 hours which seems insane to me.

I sort of feel that way but I still enjoy some of them on the lighter side, but complicated af in other ways. I’m not smart enough for full automation in most of the games I play, because I’d wildly complicated, but I do enjoy very much learning how game mechanics work, so as long as I can go sufficiently far without any automation, or at most very basic automation, I very very slowly add it in many many hours after I’ve gotten sucked into the game. Usually not until several new games have been played, and dramatically fucked up because I can’t manage everything manually.

But stuff where automated base building is the main focus so everything else is kinda slow and painful.. I try to like it but it’s all just too much and also not engaging enough.

That's funny, I like Terraria, but I kinda feel the opposite way, because building stuff serves little to no purpose, progress is generally dictated by going to specific places and talking to specific NPCs, killing specific bosses, finding/grinding specific items. It all feels relatively on-rails, whereas in Factorio everything I build has a purpose and no predefined way I have to do, and there are a lot of choices and optional things I can do.

Of course I'm not saying that to dismiss your opinion, just wanted to share my side.

Satisfactory I liked (didn't finish yet) but factorio? not for me either.