https://www.factorio.com/blog/
Also, if you're reading this, you are in a demographic that is likely to absolutely love Factorio. Go buy it, it's 20 eur/usd, you won't regret it.
Some call it "Programming: The Game".
(Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.)
7pm: I think to myself, let's do some work on my side project... but first, lets play a little factorio
3am: FU#! :/
It's a joke, but like all the best jokes it's one with a large grain of truth and exactly why I've held off buying Factorio for now (Frostpunk as well).
The blog is quite good too, and the interactions I've seen with the developers have been excellent. There's a reddit community too: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio
There's an active modding community as well, and several of the mods are fairly extensive; I'd recommend beating the vanilla game first, though.
For anyone on the fence about buying the game, there is a free demo[1].
This is actually why I haven't bought it (yet). When I have the urge to program something, I think I'd rather put that towards building something real than playing Factorio.
Factorio for me is too much like work, except I think it's a fine game, I just already often spend my day making systems to put things on queues and take them off queues, trying to keep the queues from getting full or empty...
Since I get paid hourly for my normal work .... I started wondering, "Wait, why am I not just working right now? Same thing except I get paid......"
It should be called something like "Jenkins: The Game".
I actually had a similar experience with Space Chem. It was fun until I realized I was playing "Procedural Spaghetti Code: The Game."
I wish there was a "Functional Programming: The Game"
I've heard it called Cracktorio.
But yes, I have seen a lot of concepts of programming in the game.
Sure, once you go megabase scale, after a few hundred hours of playing, most hardware will lag a little. But at that point there are millions of objects the game has to track every loop, there isn't terribly much that can be done about it. The game doesn't aggregate like OpenTTD, where the number of passengers at a train stop is just a number. Because of the way it works, every piece of iron ore in a train station in Factorio is a separate object existing somewhere. (Though they do some tricks to abstract that a bit as well, see their belt compression blog posts.)
Unlike in a lot of games where the computational complexity is all graphics-oriented and done in the GPU, these computations are largely all CPU.
Modern laptops should generally be fine though.
It's still quite performant. Some of the larger factories people have built are truly stunning in scale, yet can run at 30+ updates a second. People can host games with hundreds of players with relative ease.
At the beginning of the game, even quite modest computers will have no trouble with it, but that's not a reflection of what the game is about. Big factories are much of the point.
Worth it though. Probably the best game I've ever played.