It's Factorio, and it's pretty good at giving you little dopamine hits as you complete smaller automation goals and expand.
As for people who play "work" games in their free time, the joy is often that they're doing it on their own terms. It's like how some car mechanics have a restoration/project car at home, or professional programmers make their own things.
It's factorio, a game where the goal is take raw materials from a planet you crash landed on and eventually process them into parts to build a rocket off the planet. There are a lot of intermediate steps to get there of course, and while it is possible to craft straight out of the inventory, automation is practically required in order to actually process everything required in your lifetime.
I'd like to add that this game feels very polished and accessible, thanks to its developers. There's also a free demo which got me absolutely hooked (and a very reasonable price for the full game)
I'm also fascinated. I think a big part of it is coming home to tasks that are low stakes, guaranteed solvable and made fun to solve.
Gives some much needed stimulation of your job is to solve complex tasks which are high stakes, not guaranteed solvable and which require lots of effort for little reward.
For me, it's like how people played with train sets in the 40s.
You're just watching the system go. You fix some things here and there. There's no reward, besides intrinsic dopamine boosts. And little to no failure. Except from outsiders who mock it.
Two lanes everywhere is the simplest and most conventional solution for this. But I might be tempted to just make the big loop one-way and turn it into a massive roundabout
Yup, the image isn’t loading for me, but this is the way. Establish blocks with uniform size, so you can simply stamp them down. The nice part about this is that you can easily create loops without needing to worry about whether or not the ends will meet up; Since they’re all the same size, it’s just making a big grid.
And yeah, 100% use two lanes. Train path finding is odd, and having two separate lanes for bidirectional travel is extremely important as your factory gets larger.
I usually incorporate power lines and logistic bot ports in the designs too, so that I don’t need to worry about running those separately. Space the grid out so it coincides with your logistics bot coverage. You just blueprint it out, and then your logistics automatically expands to cover it and build it out as soon as the roboports and power lines get placed.
Lastly, establishing a standardized train size will help with being able to stamp down train depots. If all of your trains are 2 engines and 8 cars, you can design your depots to account for that standard size. Then just include a spot for inputs or outputs (and a few places for waiting trains) and you’ll be golden.
For instance, I usually had four balanced blue conveyor belts of input for my pickup depot. Two train stations with the same name (so trains can pick whichever one is available) and two more spaces for waiting trains. So a single station can have up to four trains loading/waiting for pickup, and they’ll load as fast as the four blue belts will carry inputs. I simply tie my inputs into those balanced belts, and the blueprint handles the rest. Something like this, except I normally use two single-sided pickup stations instead of a single double-sided station:
Definitely needs more train signals to increase throughput over the straight sections. Otherwise, the network design is far more creative than the city blocks I use as a crutch!
I'd caveat this by saying more signals is best done with two lanes. For two-way single-lane track you need everything in one signalling block to avoid gridlocks