Factorio is the prototypical machine building game. It also has an extensive modding scene.

Dyson Sphere Project is extremely similar to Factorio.

Satisfactory is Factorio but 3d and first person.

Minecraft tech modpacks are usually basically machine building games. Right now I'm playing Create: Astral

Try besiege. It's about building medieval siege engines to knock over castles.

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. City builder/production line game where there's a good clear RL goal: meet your people's needs and keep your economy afloat.

gets deep into the weeds with infrastructure. gravity based sewer systems, low, medium, high voltage lines, district heating, realistic waterworks, walkable cities, rail, and of course, good old BRUTALIST architecture.

very much an engineer's city-builder

I think most of the Zachtronics games qualify? Cost generally isn't a factor, but you get a rating based on number of parts used, time it takes for your machine to fulfill the task given, and... some third factor I forget lol.

• Opus Magnum
• Shenzhen I/O
• Infinifactory
• SpaceChem

Exapunks and the others might, but I'm not too familiar with them.

IIRC Infinifactory is considered the best on-ramp for someone new to the genre, but all of them are incredibly complex.

Space engineers is fun if you can ignore how incredibly crap it is. With some mods applied it can have some decent engineering challenges. I have a severe love hate relationship with that game

Check out Oxygen Not Included

Infinifactory is a game about designing a factory that turns a set of inputs into a specific output, a different kind of engineering than jn your examples but a cool one to explore nevertheless. It's got a blocky aesthetic, a puzzle game vibe, and a simple story about joining the resistance to an alien empire.

One of the cool things about Infinifactory is that the "leaderboards" are bell curves that measure different kinds of efficiency - so you could design your factory for high speed, low part count, make it not waste any materials, or some combination of goals and see how your solution measures up to what other players came up with.

Does Dwarf Fortress count?

I feel like it counts because half the game is designing incredibly elaborate ways to automatically delete siege attempts and invasions.

300 goblins? Release the lava reservoir we pumped from the depths of hell earlier.

Minecart machineguns

Supply chains. Requirement to trade for resources if you do not have resources available locally. Keeping various resources on hand because they might be needed for a sudden mood.

Yeah it's definitely an engineering game. Even water pressure is a factor in contraptions.

Create mod for minecraft has a lot of this. No magic blocks doing things.

To process a tree down into logs:

1. First make a contraption that cuts down the trees and replant saplings
2. Then connect up a hub to empty the storage of the tree-cutting contraption onto a belt
3. Run the wood on the belt through a saw to split the logs
4. Do further processing on logs with other contraptions to turn into other usable resources.

The ultimate goal of Create (without modpacks or anything) is to set up an automation route to bake a cake, but your imagination is really the limit when it comes to what you can do.

Outdated trailer that has only gotten more impressive since then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8W-f9YhYA

If you're looking for more structured gameplay maybe try the Create: Above and Beyond modpack that provides progression in the form of quests to guide you through Create's main mechanics.

Uh Subnautica could fall in that category when it comes to building bases and choosing what upgrades to have on mechs and constructs.

Lots of "cost" management when it comes to choosing what raw materials you want to use for whatever project to you have going.

Also a good idea to play if (and Subnautica below zero) before Subnautica 2 comes out in 2025

the original kerbal guy made some new thing called KitHack model club that i assume is kerbal for RC cars and planes

So Factorio would be like the ur-example. It's all about producing very complicated factories. The dev is a squidnozzle so pirate without remorse

Dyson Sphere Program is a cool game about, well, building a Dyson sphere. You have to build huge factories across multiple planets or even star systems to harness the power of the sphere (or swarm). A recent update added an enemy to fight if you're in to that, but you very much just can build and build and build and build and build

Gratuitous Space Battles is an ancient auto-battler where you build a fleet of ships using various hulls and components then set them up, give them orders, and watch them fight it out with the enemy fleet. There's lots of options and setting up synergies between ships and taking advantage of enemy weaknesses is important

I think Ostranauts might have this but honestly I have bounced off this game like a brick wall, it's complex.

Outpost Infinity Siege isn't this, it's a weird combination of FPS, extraction shooter, tower defense, base management, and a couple of other htings. But the core loop is - explore, loot stuff, defend your tower to extract stuff, return to base, build new stuff for your tower, then repeat. You have lots of building pieces, machines, turrets, utilities, and so forth you can add to your tower, and it can get quite complex as you try to balance armor, utilities, power, ammunition, while setting up all your turrets for optimum fields of fire and coverage. I've spent hours and hours building and tweaking my base. Late game you can set up an ammunition factory, too. There have been many quality of life updates since launch that have made progression much faster and more reliable so it's easier to get in to now that at launch. Really unique game, there isn't anything else like it.

A big part of X4: Foundations is building stations, assigning ships to convey resources and products between them, building large factory complexes, setting up trade with the various factions, and managing your tech. It's really it's own thing, a very big, complicated, messy space capitalism sandbox. Not nearly as complex as Factorio but I did end up with a bunch of spreadsheets to track my fleets, my station inputs and outputs, and so forth.

Besieged is a fun old doohickey building game. Your task is to blow up a castle or tower or some sheep and the game gives you tons of mechanisms and doodads to stick together. Once you've built your machine you turn the simulation on and watch the chaos.

Nebulous: Fleet Command is more or less "The Expanse: The Video Game". It's a very granular space combat sim where you design ships, assemble your fleet and go to war in a PvP environment. radar coverage, E-war, jamming, point defense, very granular resource management, and shooting shipping containers full of explosives in huge salvos are all key to gameplay. It's very very cool.

Rimworld can be this. You're mostly ordering around your little dudes, but they work a lot like semi-autonomous machines. It's much much more approachable than the very similar Dorf Fortress.

Astroneer has elements of this but it's mostly exploring.

With the right mods Fallout IV can involve building a lot of complex gadgets and whatsits to produce resources at your settlements.

children of a dead earth

you could probably play this game for heat transfer and intermediate aerodynamics lab credit

Is there a game like this but for constructing buildings, villages, and means of production? I barely play any games, so maybe I'm just describing Minecraft or Civ. But I played Valheim with my friends when that game first came out, and I got so invested in building a village for the group that I didn't even play the main story line.

Basically I think I'd really be into a game which is like a historical materialism simulator. Starting from building a small village community, building defenses from the elements, improving means of production and discovering new technologies, class conflict as new technologies wipe away the social basis for old traditions, conflict with other civilizations, etc. I feel like I'm just describing Civ (haven't played) but is there one which is more first-person?

Edit: let's say it's a game where you take the role of Hegel's Spirit but also hop into the body of an individual character at different times, kind of like a cross between Civ and Minecraft. It would be cool if a server would last several months or years, with players logging in and improving the society somewhat. If you don't log in for a month, you might come back and find that the user base advanced the server from feudalism to capitalism, or maybe two parts of the map went to massive war against each other.

Huh... I wouldn't have lumped MOO into this catageory...

I guess Space Rangers would kinda fit into this category too. Plot of the game is fighting off a mysterious robo-alien threat that is genociding its away across space but pretty much everything you need to do to accomplish that is getting the cash for different manufactures/classes of ship hulls and managing the space limitation of the hull with the space that the equipment takes up while leaving enough free space to pick up stuff from planets/salvage from space.

I'm just trying to feel out where the bounds of this genre are, have you played Opus Magnum or Armored Core?

PolyBridge was pretty fun

Juno New Origins was just on sale, I got it very cheap and its quite good. It doesn't replace KSP 1 with mods but if you want a different more straight forward building style with added bonus of much better performance. Its also probably much easier to get into for a noob. However everything is procedural so you must enjoy messing with sliders a lot.

Overall its quite underrated it seems after looking at the subreddit people are like "wow this is good why are people so obsessed with KSP 2 when this exists?" yeah about that...

Also worth noting these same devs just announced Simple Planes 2 which I'm not familiar with but seems like basically the same but different? Worth checking maybe.

Stormworks, voxel based vehicle building game. It probably has the best multiple-rigid body simulation (still not very good). There's a programmable lua block. You have to balance fuel air ratios in diesel engines. There's a pressure simulation that I haven't engaged with much. Hook up logic nodes. Make tank.

The actual missions you go on are mid, the meat of the game is building stuff. I'd say the engineering is nerdier than KSP.

Polybridge series of course!