Is combat focus a deal breaker? If not: Faster Than Light Volcanoids (early access) Darkest dungeon (kind of) Xcom

If you step away from the ship, things like mass effect and outer worlds come to mind. If the ship can be a base there’s a whole world there. Astroneer, planet crafter (early access), Starbound, terraria, Subnautica If exploration/colony sim is cool you’re looking at factorio, rift breaker, frostpunk, ixion (hardcore!), satisfactory

I expect I’ve stayed from your prompt at this point. It’s a tough niche. Good luck with your search!

Edit: on mobile, don’t know why my line breaks didn’t work. Forgive the formatting.

The crust is my top pick, very promising resource management colony sim

If you have the budget for it, get an SSD. You will never look back. Even if you never open a game, the difference in pc boot and application load times alone makes it worth it. Not to mention the increased life span, as others have mentioned. If budget is a serious concern, you can consider a fusion drive. Fusion drives have a segment using the same memory cells as SSD for frequently used programs, and a traditional spinning disk HDD section for affordable storage. Especially if you are looking to upgrade to 2+TB, a fusion drive can bridge the financial gap. But my personal recommendation would be to splurge a bit on a full SSD, and get at least 2TB if at all possible. Files sizes get bigger every year, and if you intend this to be your only storage the extra breathing room will be a huge QOL difference.