Gaming

Try out some incremental games! Some good popular games in the genre are Cookie Clicker, Realm Grinder, Antimatter Dimensions (and its mods), and there's a whole world of little niche incremental games out there waiting to be discovered.

Rimworld, at the later hours of a colony, becomes more of an idling game. Mods make it even more so by making your pawns and defenses insanely overpowered. My late game colonies usually have 5-10 brawlers that absolutely shred everything.

A little late to the party, maybe you've found your game already and I'm not sure if this is what you search for, but what I did, while writing my master's thesis, was playing Stardew Valley.

It's cozy for the most part. The game auto saves after you finish an ingame day (it saves when you wake up the next morning if I remember correctly). Days were for me roughly 15-25 minutes, depending on how far I was in the game.

So what I did was play a day in Stardew Valley, then write my thesis for a while, play another day, write my thesis, play two days, write my thesis and so on. (I admit, there were days where I played more, but hey, I finished my thesis!)

Good luck with your studies!

If you want to ruin your life, there's always Eve Online. There's lots to do when checking it infrequently (mining, selling/buying stuff, etc.). You can then play actively for PVE content and PVP.

Factorio would be perfect to let it play itself after you are far enough into the game. Play on peaceful mode so that you don’t have the enemies destroying your buildings

I would check out r/incremental_games for games like that. We're starting a community for it here on lenny [email protected].

A bit late, but hypixel skyblock may fit (it's a minecraft mmo based on 1.8.9) which has many idle game components and many ways to play while active