Sounds like what you are describing is, SOMEWHAT similar to monster hunter?
Where you slightly build-up and improve your base as a sort of way to gain an advantage for the rest of the game which takes place outside of it?
I do think what you're hitting on is that survival is to an extent contradictory to building, as surviving SHOULD progress towards thriving as you build, if it does not your building will feel pointless, fruitless and unrewarding, why build this awesome base if I'm still somehow left hungry and cold shivering in a ditch?
Personally I find a game that handles this really well to be RimWorld, as the threats of the world scale up as you do, you can definitely feel that you are making progress without feeling like an untouchable god king.
My question to you, is which games of the survival/building genre combo have you played and felt this level of imbalance with?
Viewing post in The Problem With Survival Building Games [IMO] comments
Rimworld - is a great game, but I don't consider that survival. Maybe it is? It is a strategy/building game IMO.
Fallout 76 - but maybe that game just doesn't work for me because it is Fallout 76. I do remember being ticked of that in the CAMP I was building I still had to stop and go cook or gather more food.
Don't Starve - everything feels like a a chore. I like the game, but imagine the game with a secure base to build what you want with no time constraints.
Monster Hunter - isn't really a survival game either, is it? I've played it a little bit but I don't remember having to eat and drink. I do get what you are saying though; you have a home you comeback to and gear up for the next fight.
The whole Rust genre model I just can't get into. It isn't my style to be a hard core PVP jerk.
I don't play a lot of mobile games but the Last Day On Earth type of games. I've tried several and they run into the same problem. Although they are probably just trying to sell you some MT loot boxes or whatever.
Maybe instead of having food something you MUST eat to survive you could make food give you buffs that will help you tackle great challenges. First game I can think of would be WOW. So if you spend time leveling up cooking or growing crops you can get better loot sooner.
I guess my problem is the time constraint. For example Fallout 1 had a time constraint and I modded the game to basically take it away. I want to take my time and explore. Also maybe if I gave those games a chance it would get better managing all of that stuff. Other might not be like that, I get it. Again this is just my opinion. My taste is games have changed since my child hood. C64 and arcade games are no longer my jam.
Personally I'd 100% consider Rimworld to be survival, it's just that you're not playing as a single entity but rather as the colony as a whole, you still need food, water, temperature, even social interaction and comfort, as well as health, and health for all of your individual body parts and organs, honestly to me it's far more survival-y than most survival games.
Monster Hunter definitely isn't survival, I was just comparing it to what I envisioned what you envisioned may look like, personally I love games where you can build up a sort of home base which aids in all of your adventures, from full on progression, such as new gears, skills, quests or more available to you that simply wouldn't be otherwise, to convenience increases (without making the base unpleasantly inconvenient), for example in raft or even factorio, the ability to slowly automate tasks that once required your full time attention and effort is some of the most satisfying feelings offered by any sandbox game.
An example of that sort of expansion based progress that I personally love is FTB Infinity Evolved skyblock, a minecraft modpack where you start on a TINY, virtually useless dirt island, typically 3x3, 2x2 or 1x1 with a single tree, perhaps a hammer, and from that you begin the process of expansion, cutting trees, planting trees, composting leaves into dirt, expanding your tree farm, creating a crook, collecting silk worms from trees, using silk and wood to make a sieve, sieving dirt to get things like stone, seeds and other resources you use for expansion, the entire game is basically a tech tree that opens up until you've got automated tree/coal/lava/water/obsidian/everything farms, obviously that same scale would be nigh-impossible for a small team to meet, but that feeling is something I think is worth trying to replicate, that feeling of "wow, I can't believe how far I've come"
Honestly, a lot of that was probably of very little use, but I hope you managed to gleam SOMETHING of worth from it. :)
I'd definitely agree on the other examples you gave though, they're definitely games where you are expected to survive, not thrive, which TYPICALLY makes your advances feel insignificant, in contrast, rimworld has an ending, where you leave the planet via starship, effectively making the game a massive roguelike, where you start again if you lose and you have a specfic goal in mind you very well may not reach, factorio is similar in that boat, although I guess Rimworld has saves and Factorio has respawns, so not quite roguelike-y.