Mnemogenic I’m curious to know how you would (or if you would) distinguish this from something like SimRefinery.
I am going to make some assumptions about its gameplay since the Youtube gameplay demo video I brought up on it was too boring, I would say the main difference between SimRefinery and games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Project et. al is that the actual logistics part of automating the factory is not abstracted.
What SimRefinery looks like to me is that you manage productivity and efficiency by tooling different parameters (which you also do in factory simulation games), but logistics is not really incorporated into the gameplay. It seems like in SimRefinery for instance, you build parts of the refinery and tool different parameters of different buildings, and magical little gnomes set up pipelines and truck routes between them. Flow rate or throughput of materials between buildings might be simulated based on where you build them, but, that part of the game doesn’t seem to incorporate much granular detail.
In Factorio things are not so convenient. It’s up to you to not just build the pipelines but to connect output to input for everything. You can’t just build a mining drill and a smelter and get iron. You need to build a mining drill that deposits iron ore on to a belt which moves it to smelters which are fed iron (and coal) with machines and the iron also gets removed from the smelter with machines on to another belt and to another machine and…………. so on. You have to actually build all of that, 1×1 map tile of conveyer belt in a specific direction by 1×1 map tile of conveyer belt.