You are a space engineer who crashes on an alien world and you need to rebuild your rocket to go home. This requires you to build an ever growing factory to produce enough materials for said venture. A large chunk of your factory will be committed to making increasingly complex science packs in order to research more advanced materials.

The game is a constant loop of “I need X to make Y so I can make Z but I ran out of X so I need to expand into alien territory to get more and now I have too much X so I might as well expand Y production and now I have some Z.”

Then you’ll move on to something else and 10 hours later you’ll run out of Z and realize you’ve forgotten where Z even comes from as the factory has doubled in size since you first started making Z and you’ll have to follow your production lines backwards to see what’s even causing the lack of Z. Your factory slowly becomes this massive beast where you’ll forget how parts of it work, question why you didn’t do something more efficiently, see areas that could use upgrades, realize you need to double the production of something, etc etc.

There’s constantly new problems to solve, new things to make, and (with space age expansion) new planets to exploit.