It’s a bit different, but did you try Oxygen Not Included?

https://youtu.be/wcLayGm_pM4

ONI is a 2D (from the side) base / colony builder where you keep a bunch of workers alive. They need oxygen, food, shelter and sanitation, and a whole bunch of optional things.

You, as a player, can only tell what needs to be done. The workers will do it (whenever they feel like). You can prioritize jobs, and you can prioritize tasks per worker. (I.e. you want one to build, one to cook, etc)

Workers that are happy can take on more complex jobs. Workers become more happy if more needs are met, or with better quality (e.g. better food, nice bed, nice bedroom, nice place to eat, long breaks, good sleep)

You can automate a lot of things, but they’re all pretty hard. The game has pretty high difficulty and will be a constant challenge. There are many ways to solve specific problems, all with distinct advantages and disadvantages.

There are, for example, literally 10s of different ways to get food for your workers, plant based, animal based, or mixed. Animals require other resources (eg plants). The plants and animals usually have distinct requirements, like they need the environment to be hot or cold, or they need specific kind of food/fertilizer/water. The plants and animals will usually also produce some kind of resource. For example, there’s a type of animal that eats iron ores and poops refined iron, or one that consumes carbon dioxide and poops coal. There’s an animal that likes to live in a room filled with Hydrogen that will grow plastic fur, but it still needs oxygen to breath (so you need a room that has both hydrogen and oxygen in a certain balance)

The animals are all… creative.

All machines produce heat, so your base will very slowly heat up until you setup active cooling (which is a huge challenge). You can cool down the air you produce (oxygen) before it’s being circulated, or you can cool down the machines, or you can move the machines away from the base (somewhere isolated).

Some things require very cold environments or very hot. Some chemical processes require you to heat up a room or floor to over 400C, while food can be preserved near indefinitely in a room of carbon dioxide at -21C. (But workers can’t breathe in there so they better not get stuck in there).

You can create steam power plants by building steel rods into magma and cooling these rods with water, but have fun trying to keep your steam at reasonable temperatures because if uncontrolled your steam will be over 1000C and will certainly break something and escape your steam room and spread everywhere, destroying or killing anything on its path before condensing into water again.

Many of these processes require specific materials that can resist or transfer heat easily, or insulate heat, or doesn’t easily melt. Some materials are hard to get, or require starting new colonies on other planets, or require mining “ore fields” with rockets. (DLC content)

You can choose what materials to use in many buildings. For example, you can have a heat pump made of iron, but it will overheat very quickly so cooling it will be hard. You can make a heat pump out of steel, so it’s much easier to deal with but steel is harder to produce (it requires resources gathered that comes in low quantities inside eggs, or can be dug up from deep biomes which are very hot and will kill your workers without protection)