Which survival games focus on mastery of your environment?
My favorite thing to do in a survival game is to explore new areas and master them over time.
It's the classic loop in Minecraft of - leave all your stuff, wander off in a random direction, and slowly build up a base. I love getting to know a new area, developing routes to travel, maybe paving roads or paths to make my travel easier. Building up resource farms, starting to automate processes.
Are there any games that do this particularly well?
What I usually run into with games is that they often don't incentivize you to actually build bases in new areas. Or the grinding for resources gets too repetitive. Or later game, you don't get the tools to build things sufficiently fast for the scale you want to work at (transportation networks seem to be the worst offenders here).
Any recommendations as to games I should try out?
Games I've liked the most that come close - Minecraft, Subnautica, Satisfactory.