What other games are like programming?
Some of my favorite modpacks are Enigmatica 2: Expert, Omnifactory, and one I just started recently, Divine Journey 2.
They all have a similar process of starting with nothing but a book full of quests to guide your progression, and end up with you automating everything from farms to quarries to mob grinders in order to produce items that have comically difficult "recipes" to craft.
Scratches the same itch as Factorio, Zachtronics games, Satisfactory, etc. but often has some fun side goals such as making your factory look beautiful, exploration, fighting bosses, and best of all, getting your friends hooked on the game and playing on a server in a group!
One of the first public posts about it was on the industrial craft forums: https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/8845-factorio/?pos...
Some are more programming-like than others.
The man's rich enough to be swimming with whales or partying in space and he's sitting in his basement playing Satisfactory.. there must be something to it
It's a lot of fun. I'm not much for optimizing every little detail of production, but its a lot of fun to build and work out supply chains.
Some lesser-known recommendations:
Bitburner (a game in which you use javascript to "hack" computers... not really hacking, but really using your javascript skills)
Screeps (use real programming languages to harvest and compete for resources... sort of like an RTS, but where you program your units instead of directly telling them what to do)
Neon Noodles (use a simple visual programming language to program robots to make sushi... super innovative game, with a free demo on steam... highly recommended)
Mindustry has a little programming if I recall correctly -- mostly it is tower defense and resource gathering, though.
EDIT: As you can see, everybody was excited to bring up Zachtronics. Really neat developer.
minecraft (redstone/technical farms get quite sophisticated)
astroneer
The be fair the 3 last are more programming than like :)