Caves of Qud is one of the best exploration games I've ever played. It's a traditional roguelike where the overworld map is the same each time but the world history, factions, and most individual zones are procedurally generated each time you start over.

You play as either a mutated human with strange bonuses like extra arms, the ability to mind control, wings, etc. or a Truekin that starts with higher base stats and the ability to use implant tech to do things like replace your legs with tank treads or your eyes with night-vision goggles.

It's a deep simulation; all of the NPCs in the game are as fully modeled as the player character, the NPCs you meet are a result of the generated history, and the best choice is often to run away.

It's turn-based with multiple difficulty levels. I recommend playing on classic, but the other ways are just as valid.

If you enjoy automation, tower defense, survival/building games Rimworld might be of interest to you. Enjoying committing war crimes is optional but a nice bonus!

My favorite game to play when I am sick is Banished, a medieval city building game that was the labor of love of a solo dev. It starts off quite brutally difficult until you learn the best ways to handle the first winters and then it becomes a cozy opportunity for optimization, and a challenge to balance expanding the city as much as you can while supporting the population with agricultural and forestry goods. It's inspired some other games to follow in its footsteps, and it has a modding community still making content for it.

I'm really into souls games so I'm going to focus my recommendations to games with little combat and also tailor the list based on what you tried and didn't like so far.

Optional or minimal combat

• Green Hell
• My Summer Car [AI generated paintings]
• Potion Craft
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
• Subnautica [controversy with dev buyout and lawsuit, but a solid game]

Combat required but easy

• Yakuza Kiwami (the other yakuza and like a dragon games are great too but some of them might have kernel level rootkits, and some are available on GOG without rootkits)
• Final Fantasy 12 The Zodiac Age

Exploration focused

• Dave the Diver
• A Short Hike
• Disco Elysium
• The Stanley Parable
• The Talos Principle (1 and 2)
• Stray

Story focused games (non exploration)

• Unpacking
• Venba

Worth trying

• Tropico 6

Something small: Len's Island. I had fun with that. It's pretty light, but has some depth in resource management and exploration

If you are open to anything, try Wingspan.

It is a bird based card game you gain points for playing birds based on the number on the card, but it becomes an engine building game.

Each turn you choose one: play a bird, gather food, lay eggs, add a bird card to your hand.

Birds have certain "powers" such as each time your opponent lays eggs place an egg on your bird, or each turn used collect food from the birdfeeder.

The game is limited turns so you have to develop a hand of cards that you can play that will be high points, plus give you extra bonus actions to try to accelerate birds played, eggs laid, extra birds captured by predator birds etc.

As cards are laid down into food, eggs, collect cards sections it increases the reward of that section.

You can play online, with friends or against the computer. It becomes addicting in my opinion, because filling each section is difficult and just as you are collecting a good way to build a good reward engine the turns are ending, so you have to plan properly.

I loved minmaxing and grinding around in Grim Dawn and Timberborn. You might too. 👌

If you've never tried it before, Dot Age is a fun little time sink made by an Indie dev. It's a city builder people/resource management type game where you're trying to build a successful village to survive a coming apocalypse. You have to plan ahead and deal with upcoming 'bad events.' A run is like 5-6 hours long and there is a lot of variety between runs thanks to building variants, etc.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Game about cutting up spaceships with lasers and gravity tools with a bit of a narrative.

It's not a great alignment for the types you identified, but I like all the things you mentioned and found this quite nice.

Exo Rally Championship: Probably the best rally game out there right now. Rewards carefulness and planning ahead.

Outbrk: Storm chasing simulator.

DinoSystem: Very deep survival simulation with dinosaurs.

Stationeers: Build and automate your own space station. Also features gas simulation.

Brainfuck Challenge: Brainfuck is a esoteric programming language with very few instructions you can learn in a few minutes. And this game is just a collection of puzzles/challenges made to be solved with this language.

shapez 2: Factorio but with shapes and colors

Beton Brutal/White Knuckle/Idols of Ash/Lorn's Lure: A bunch of precision platformers with no combat whose sole goal is go up/down as fast as you can. Lorn's Lure would be my favorite of the bunch but they're all unique in their own ways.

Nubby's Number Factory: Plinko meets neuron activation

Mars First Logistics is a fairly tricky building/exploration game where you make and operate robots from parts to explore the world to get more parts. What you get out of it depends a lot on how you play it.

Designing a new vehicle for each task makes it more of a building game.

Trying to reuse/modify the same vehicle for every task makes it more of a driving/operating game.

Choosing tasks based on what you can already do makes it more of an exploration/road trip game.

If you build infrastructure to get everywhere it's more of an expand/exploit/city building game.

If you want to sink countless hours into it and are looking for automation, building and exploration.. maybe X4: Foundations is something for you? It's basically a giant, fully simulated space sandbox. (And you'd also be supporting a small independent studio, writing their own engine etc.)

A very fun exploration and puzzle game would be Tunic. It has combat which can be pretty tricky at times but in the game's settings you can make yourself invincible so you can just get through the combat if you'd like. If you try Outer Wilds and like it, I would try Tunic as well.

Both of these games are so interesting because they can be completed at any point, but it's completely dependent of everything you the player learn while playing the game. But for that reason I would not look into the games more than what's on the Steam store page, you gotta go in blind.

Outerwilds for s-tier exploration/puzzling. Best to go in blind on this one.

Halls of Torment is a lot like vampire survivors and done extremely well

Emberward is a great tower defense game where you also design the track the enemies use with little Tetris prices

Shape of Dreams is a isometric top down roguelike with optional co-op that is reminiscent in league of legend's character design but is fully PVE with encounters where you clear rooms and boss challenges.

Satisfactory: you land on a planet and have to build a massive factory to make parts to build machines to make other parts to build things to send back to earth to save it.

As someone who loves automation and building, and design. This game just dominated my brain for almost two months.

You are welcome, and I am so sorry...

[edit: also check out Timberborn. I'm currently addicted to it. A very streamlined city builder where you control cities of beavers that work with/exploit the poisoned landscape hoomans left behind to survive.]

One exploration / sim game that can soak up a lot of hours if you get into it is Elite Dangerous. I see No Man's Sky in didn't work or 'finished', if it didn't work Elite may not be for you, similar but with better combat and 'realism' and a lot less life (as in biomes). Very much a choose (/make) your own adventure but they keep adding gameplay loops...

I found Journey to a Savage Planet and it's sequel enjoyable, FPS puzzle platformer where you explore and document the local flora and fauna.

The Isle is a nice time sink, you play as a dinosaur and have to grow and survive, maybe live long enough to start a little dino family. You want to change the game version to Envirma (sic) as that is the version currently getting developed.

If you want a fresh jaunt in an mmorpg I highly recommend Guild Wars 2. Starter accounts are free so no cost in trying it. Amazing story, plenty of content, and the best community of any multiplayer game I've ever played. Hope you give it a try!

I’ve been having a blast playing Pikmin 3 using the Eden switch emulator.

sandustry is pretty cool, it’s a 2d falling sand based factory builder. early access now iirc, and still new enough that there’s not a lot of guides or tutorials available.

i really dug it bc it REALLY appealed to the min/max part of my brain. every little efficiency boost felt like a discovery lol

These might not be for you but I want to provide a couple of options that aren't exactly what you're asking for but are pretty close. No offense taken if you think they are terrible.

Lonestar - Top down space rogue-like where you place modules in your ship to synergize damage output. Also known as 'space math'.

Sunless Skies - Steam punk space train set in the Fallen London universe. Emphasis on exploration and the setting just oozes style. Also the soundtrack is awesome.

Halcyon 6 - Take control of a space station and try to put together a fleet to replace the one that gets nuked at the start of the game.

Emberward would be right up your alley. It's a rogue-like TD with tetrimono you customize during your run. It just went 1.0 last week and has 96% positive ratings on Steam with almost 4,000 reviews. It's also currently on launch sale.

I know you've said Satisfactory and Mindustry... but I can't believe no one has suggested Factorio...

That game is good at keeping me up at night til 2am wanting to expand and remake my factory.

You can think of it like 2D satisfactory, but there's much more of a base defense mechanic because you get periodically rushed at by groups of bugs annoyed at your pollution.

I've been having a really fun time with vintage story, a.minecraft alternative that goes for detail. It has stuff like crop rotation, a realistic (compared to minecraft at least) steel making process. I think it offers a lot richer and more varied experience than vanilla minecraft, and is surprisingly good about not forcing you to grind.

GregTech New Horizons mod pack for Minecraft. There’s thousands of hours of automation entertainment there.

You'd love space engineers.

Kerbal Space Program is a great time sink

The Alters: This is a survival base building game, with some automation. You and yourself and your other selves are stuck on an asteroid and are trying to keep your base out of the Sun's path while collecting materials and resources to keep going. Minimal 'combat', mostly avoiding anomalies.

The Long Dark: A survival game where you are in the frozen northern Canadian wilderness and you need to hunt/gather and stay warm. There's a storymode to play through, challenges to go for, or just try the survival mode. Minimal combat, avoid wolves, and bears.

Graveyard Keeper: Base building game with a bit of automation if you have one of the DLCs. Build up a graveyard, while trying to figure out how you got here and how to return home. A lot of tongue and cheek humor. It's similar to Stardew Valley but instead of making friends you help them out to help yourself. There is combat in the game but it is very basic.

The Planet Crafter might be your jam.

You might enjoy SteamWorld Dig. Get well soon!

Timberborn definitely. Also, Factorio, which has a better balance of simplicity, complexity, and interface automation than Satisfactory or Mindustry, as well as a different goal. Also mods lmao