It’s not a survival sim. Dear god if I had to do actual busywork like manage fatigue or hunger bars, in order to get to the fun part of building stuff.

There’s some combat involved in exploring, but at its core, the game is a management sim. It’s a giant spreadsheet dressed up as an FPS.

Balancing the numbers of the production lines, is the point. Can a factory still run if you don’t do that? Sure, but very inefficiently. If you’re running out of stuff faster than you can use it to build stuff, your factory isn’t big or efficient enough.

If you have time to kill before your factory produces what’s needed for the next milestone, you have time to increase capacity or load balance inputs and outputs.

If you’re leaving the game to run to achieve your goals instead of doing that while your existing machinery works through the milestones, the game probably isn’t for you. Doubly so if you need something to “press you to do things” because constructing automated factories while doing the math to maintain efficiency is somehow not its own reward for you.