magic is definitely an option, but we're talking about an entire field of science here. How are we supposed to define something without reductive reasoning? The only other real possibility would be religious in nature.

All we know, or more specifically, all i know about the biters is that they're a seemingly persistent, constant across any given world. They don't seem to be feeding on anything. They don't even consume the player when killed. They seem to be explicitly aggressive against the player, for who knows what reason. They seem to benefit explicitly, and massively from pollution, and they also seem to direct targeted attacks towards the source of that pollution, all of which in an evolutionary sense would take billions of years. So presumably, there must be more than one person on this planet, and this must be a very regular cycle. Or perhaps it's a sort of multiverse deal where this simply loops forever?

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

yeah, i mostly just meant it in comparison to like tigers, or something. We hate ants, wasps, and insects in general, we seem to have little problem killing them on the regular, however when it comes to things like tigers, we seem less receptive to it. It's certainly an interesting choice to base the biters on an insectoid type species.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

It's definitely interesting, but i feel like exploitation of resources is probably the only good setting for this game. We can look at something like shapez for instance, similar to factorio, but it's a sterile environment, where you produce shapes. Suddenly that seems even more dystopian by nature. Are you just a dude shipped to a massive sterile warehouse and told to create various different shapes as a method of commoditization? Who knows.

At least with resource exploitation, there's a very clear driving path, there's an entirely independent motivation (not being on that planet, because lore wise, you crashed there, and aren't supposed to be there, and how else are you supposed to leave without exploiting resources? Sure you could wait for someone else, but they also exploited resources, and them arriving isn't a guarantee, so you might as well keep busy and do it yourself.) Though to be clear, i haven't played shapez, so maybe there is some kind of weird lore behind it, i'm assuming there isn't.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

I always like to think of it from the perspective of something like a lion. Killing animals for sustenance. At the end of the day, we all must cause some level of destruction to progress. In this case we cause very little destruction once we do leave, because inevitably the base will cripple, run out of power, and the biters will overrun it, destroying everything in it's place, claiming it as theirs again, and expanding back over it. Just at an extremely high level of evolution now instead.

There is an eventual yin to every yang.