Autonauts

This is a bigger iceberg than the one that sank the Titanic.
Don't let those cutesy graphics fool you. Although the method of letting bots record what you do is simple enough, in some ways Autonauts is more challenging than Factorio. I managed to finish Factorio as well, but I largely did it by manually running my own freight. In Factorio you can carry hundreds of units of any given commodity in your inventory. In Autonauts, you can carry four.
As a result, designing and building automated logistics is mandatory. It's not enough to just build production bots; you have to make couriers as well, and mentally plan the routes between producers and consumers, and I have had to re-start multiple times, in order to make everything fit together and get it right.
It doesn't seem like it at first. You press record and manually perform an action, and the bot copies you. Nothing simpler, right? No programming required. Later on, however, you notice that the bot only performed the option once and then stopped, because you forgot to surround its' code with a "do forever" bracket.
Then, you've set your lumberjacking bot up to automatically cut down trees, and are proudly watching it do its' work. A few minutes later it will stop, with a blinking thought bubble, because its' crude axe has broken. Now you have a choice. Do you keep manually crafting replacement axes for it, or do you automate the crafting process? Assuming you do, how do you then get the bot to get an axe when its' old one breaks? How do you make sure that you give the lumberjack bot a clear path to where the crafted axes are stored? Do you actually make another bot to throw a crafted axe to the lumberjack when it needs it?
You also need to mine stone for axe heads. Have you scouted out a mine site yet? How far away is it from your tree farm? Will you need courier bots to bring the stone over? You'd better build storage crates at each end to keep it flowing.
Grounded lets you fight ants. Autonauts lets you build an ant farm.

Great game to play. Terrible game to finish.
It's cool to see all the improvements this game had over the years: Simplifying signs and lowering the requirement for bot database, multi-level folders, and if else statements!
One thing this game excel in is differentiating from the competition. Rather than copy and pasting design pattern, it's about automating different systems. You can have a group of bots that reforms the land so you can build farms there. You can have a group of bots that kills everything in one zone. It's beautiful when it all works together.

What stops me from beating the game is how tedious everything is. This is a game about recording actions rather than about programming. When you want your bots to pick up a different item or any items in an area, you have to do it first. This is interesting at first but after doing it for the 300th time it can get very tedious.
There is no ratio on how fast a bot is able to do something. How much faster is it to use a crude flail than a stick? How fast is it to cut a tree vs planting a tree vs spading a tree stump? How to deal with multiple bot wanting to deposit and grab from the same crate at the same time?
I tried this game for a few years now and was never able to get past tier 6 or 7 after feel very bored on how tedious designing bot is. Sure the database improvement does help but when you have so many bots and so many folders it still is a nightmare to handle.
Hopefully the creators best of luck in future projects and take these notes in to consideration.

This is a very different take on automation games. Most, like Factorio, Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, focus on building factories and conveyors and whatnot to effectively build a giant machine. This, however, focuses entirely on programming robots, to do the same tasks you can do, which is a totally different kind of puzzle to solve the same kinds of problems, and results in remarkably deep gameplay.
That said, the programming UI is awkward. You can't just build a list of instructions, you need to tell the robot to record and do all the relevant actions. Then you can re-arrange them, and put loops and conditionals on them. And you need a LOT of robots, so you need to do this over and over again. Eventually, you get floppy disks that let you copy programs between robots, but this has limited applicability, as if you need a robot that's similar, doing the same thing but with a different container, you still have to record and interact with that container, and re-arrange the instructions, to update it.
But if you have the patience for that, this is an excellent game.

I was surprised by how much I liked this game. It seemed to be too cutesy to have much depth to it but I was wrong.
The main gameplay is about programming robots to automate tasks like gathering wood or building things. The thing that this game does better than a lot of other games with programming elements is it doesn't actually make you write code, it's just drag and drop building blocks or recording your characters actions. It still teaches the concepts of if statements and looping but in a much less tedious way.
Once you nail down programming and building bots it feels good to not have to do repetitive tasks. With very few exceptions you can program your bot to do anything you do. So fairly early into the game I was able to program bots to gather all the resources, build more bots, and then copy programs onto them.
For an added challenge, you can select an option that will limit you to 300 bots. 80 hours in, I feel like this is a real hidden gem and I recomend it to any lovers of survival sandbox games or settlement building games.

You build robots and robots get materials to build more robots to satisfy the needs of colonists that don't know how to move.

Easily the best programming game on Steam. Colorful, lighthearted and fun, but with a great sense of progression. Coincidentally enough one of the most fun "idle" games as well. You can set up your bots to do a lot of tasks and just... let it run. If you like other factory games like Satisfactory you will love this, and if you have any programming experience at all that's even better.

Pros:
I would recommend the game as a well-implemented Scratch-like programming autonomous game - I wish there were more games like this. It's quite an original idea, I haven't seen many autonomous/industrial/programming games, and I'd love to see more. It's easy to see that the devs put a lot of work and effort into the game, as it is quite well polished.
Cons:
Although the devs put a lot of effort into this game, I feel like it was a little misplaced. Instead of having loads of achievements, tasks, animals, robot cosmetics, and silly hats to wear, the game desperately needs more robot variations and programming options. As a game centred around programming robots, there is not much variation, after 55 hours only having three robots (all identical in function, just each having minor upgrades from the last), is a little disappointing. The programming also misses out on basic commands such as 'if workbench is not already in use', which leads to a lot of frustrating situations when the base grows in size.
Overall I definitely recommend the game, and definitely worth the price (£15.99) but feel there was missed opportunity with only a small handful of programming options.