Some recommendations for weird survival construction games to play
I'm gonna recommend some weird games from one of my favorite genres. Not all of these are "good", but they're all unique.
The Planet Crafter
This one is a mix between Subnautica-derivative sci-fi outpost building gameplay, and a kind of terraforming-themed idle game. You crash land on a planet with no atmosphere, water, or plants. You then construct buildings and power systems to terraform the planet.
Even when you go nuts and construct as many terraforming devices as possible, the atmosphere changes relatively slowly over time. I didn't find myself ever stuck waiting for the numbers to go up... usually, you can find something to do while you're waiting for your buildings to generate more oxygen, heat, or atmospheric pressure. As you reach each major milestone, the environment will change - water appearing in low-lying areas is the first and most surprising one. I remember celebrating my new water... then suddenly realizing that my entire base would shortly be below "sea level"!
There are a places in the world map which can only be accessed once certain map changes occur. I thought this was a really cool choice for a designed-map open-world survival game. Most of the time, the environments in these games don't change a lot. I still haven't played a game which changes the environment as much over the course of a playthrough as The Planet Crafter does.
Volcanoids
This a pretty deranged one. It's far from perfect, and visually I found it extremely unlovely, but it's got some incredible ideas. The player lives in a mobile base which they drive around the map - one of my favorite mechanics in games like these. But your mobile base is a gigantic steampunk driller machine.
It is loud, nasty, cramped, and resource-intensive to operate. You can drive it around the surface, emerging in specific driller-safe locations scattered around a hand-authored terrain... but you can also dig underground and enter a series of (also hand-authored) caverns spotted all over the map.
And you MUST dig down, sometimes, because there is a gigantic volcano which periodically erupts and kills or destroys certain things left on the surface. Moving around in the driller is much more laborious and annoying than in most games like these - it's more annoying than the submarines in Subnautica, the blimp in Forever Skies, or the fuel-hungry physics-demon vehicles in Astroneer. But I did feel very attached to mine nevertheless - it was so laborious for me to upgrade and improve, but the improvements were meaningful. I could not help but love it by the time I was done with this game. I think there is room for games in this genre to pursue a lot of friction in the areas that other games make simple and easy. Some games have gliders to speed you effortlessly over the map... others have a fairly-frictiony, multi-step drillship-launch process which gets slower and slower the more you've upgraded your ship.
And there's just something admirable about this team trying to realize this niche fantasy. Steampunk freaks can get their survivalist fantasy, too...
Raft
This one has been around for a long time and is not particularly unusual or obscure, but if you like this genre at all, it's absolutely worth playing. Raft forces you to build your base on a raft which is periodically attacked by a gigantic shark. As you build, your raft drifts toward various islands on the horizon, some of which are properly gigantic exploration environments. The shark destroys raft segments you have built, and you must run around stabbing it when it appears. The shape of your raft can influence the efficacy of the various resource-gathering stations you build around your base, like nets to capture floating debris. The world sort of moves around your base as you drift, which completely changes your relationship to exploration and construction tasks.
In most of these games, you have to go on long missions to new parts of the world to get more resources. These games often sell the phenomenon of living in harmony with your environment in a cute little homestead, but almost all of them also model pretty vicious cycles of resource depletion, particularly for non-regrowable resources like metal and stone. To deal with this, a lot of these games will have teleportation mechanics which allow you to move very far away and access unspoiled lands for you to also deplete of resources.
Raft, on the other hand, imagines a kind of post-apocalyptic Waterworld where the trash of humanity's end is constantly floating past, and all you have to do is throw out your hook and grab some milk jugs or driftwood to build whatever you need. It makes the rhythm of this game feel completely different.