the mod save our ship 2 recently updated for rimworld. it's basically an entire game on top of rimworld. it has a really satisfying game loop that's basically "fight enemy ships of slowly increasing difficulty, pacify and disassemble or weld them to your ship, upgrade and research, repeat". eventually you will either have a cobbled together mesh of useful chunks of spacecraft or your own sleek battlecruiser.

and you can just start in space and avoid the whole "start a colony on the surface and eventually build a ship". i mod the game so i start out as a spacer-tech faction with custom biopunk crew

i have no idea why it's so compelling. rimworld itself is seeming increasingly more limited compared to dwarf fortress but this mod is a game changer (ha)

i'm basically building the Defiant right now