One thing notable about Factorio's game mechanics is that crafting is idempotent: the tech tree is a directed acyclic graph. If one is looking for a different experience in which one thinks about closing manufacturing loops, I would recommend Oxygen Not Included, where you have to sustain life amidst an asteroid colony.
> One thing notable about Factorio's game mechanics is that crafting is idempotent
What do you mean by this? You craft a thing once, you have one thing. You craft it again, you now have two things. That doesn't sound idempotent to me.
"There's no recipe chain that takes in Green Circuits and produces either Iron or Copper Wire. So once produced, you need to find a higher function for your products. You can't 'unmake' through a cyclic recipe."
There are Factorio mods that will give you access to recycling machines that will let you get back the ingredients that went in to making whatever it is that you put in to them.
So Factorio's recipes can be fully cyclic, if you want.
Oops, was thinking about composing arrows on crafting graph, not the action of crafting and the consequent inventory, and that was needlessly confusing. I should have simply said that it's non-invertible.
I tried Oxygen Not Included, after watching some Let's Plays of it that seemed interesting. However, once I actually played it I found it to be really boring compared to Factorio. Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of the time so played for more than 2 hours and so couldn't get a refund from Steam, otherwise I would have refunded it. Haven't touched it since.
By contrast, I've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Factorio, which I just can't get enough of, especially with mods, which increase the scope and possibilities of the game tremendously.
A notable exception to this is uranium and modded Factorio. In particular, Angel's Petrochem has a bunch of those loops. If you're interested in trying it I recommend Factorio SeaBlock.
