Satisfactory

Satisfactory is a different kind of obsession. There is no combat pressure, no horde night, no boss to plan around. The goal is to build a factory that is more efficient than the one you built before, and at a LAN party that collaborative optimization instinct takes over completely. One person handles smelting. Someone else is routing conveyor belts two hundred metres across a canyon. I went into a session expecting to spend an hour and emerged four hours later with a blueprint for an iron plate line I was genuinely proud of. Not the game for every group. For the right group, it is the best thing on this list.

Satisfactory is Factorio's louder, more visually chaotic younger sibling. You are building factories in first person across an alien planet, which makes it more immediately readable for players who bounced off Factorio's top-down interface. Co-op sessions naturally divide into someone planning the layout on a cliff while someone else runs logistics in the valley below, and somehow that division of labor feels intentional even when it is not. The main caveat is that performance on lower-end hardware is inconsistent, and hosted sessions can be less stable than Factorio under similar conditions. For groups with decent PCs and a taste for large-scale cooperative building, it earns its place. Just go in knowing you will be there for a while.