Gaming

I have Dorfromantik and play it occasionally. It is very relaxing, which can be nice. And very, very simple. So simple that I sort of hesitate to call it a game. There is some sort of scoring, depending on the mode you play. But I always pretty much ignored the scoring and didn't even want to try to understand how it worked. It is fun just to make your little town, forest, river, train track, etc. So it is more like model railroading to me than a videogame. But highly structured and guided model railroading.

Terra Nil is mentioned in the article but I must give it a recommendation, it’s very chill and restoring a wasteland or ruined city to a thriving ecosystem is a great counterpoint to building a bustling city.

Not like the games in the list, but Foundation Steam Link is one of my favourites and meets your criteria for being a chill one :)

I'd recommend timberborn, but the intense droughts can be pretty stressful if you're not careful. But you can totally turn down the difficulty to make them much less severe

Kingdoms and Castles would fit here. It's been getting slow but steady updates for years.

If you’re into retro games, the original Impressions city builders are great. Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus or Emperor are essentially skins of the same game and come highly recommended.

If you like minimalism Mini-Metro is great

Note: it will be stressfull in the end, still relaxing if you accept that will end after a while.

Islanders is only a few bucks and very serene. You get a random island and a small palette of buildings at a time. The buildings can only go certain places (farm on a plain, quarry near stone, hunting lodge near forest). You get points for putting certain buildings together, or certain ones further apart (mostly in ways that make sense). And that's about it. When you use up the buildings on your palette you get a new set. There's no timer, just try to get points. When you reach the goal you can start over on a new island.

It's very simple. You can't move or demolish buildings, you don't worry about roads or infrastructure of any kind, there's no citizen happiness or disasters or money or anything. Just relax and place little buildings on islands.

Just got into Stardeus

RimWorld Factorio Space Engineer space ship sim.

"Project Highrise" is another nice calm relaxing game, although in the other dimension to most city builders

You can build cities in Kenshi

Slipways is a great turn-based scifi empire builder that focuses on colonizing planets and building trade routes (titular slipways) between them to synergize. It has chill soundtrack, pretty visuals, and no war to stress about, your only worry is optimizing your empire layout

This past year I've really enjoyed The Wandering Village and Airborne Kingdom. Both are slower paced with a very unique aesthetic

There is Godus which I always thought of as a precursor to islanders. It has more elements to interrupt the player but it has the sake overall aesthetic and feel.

Edit:

I played this ages ago and the reviews after some updates are very negative so it sounds like it's no longer the game I played.

I've seen Thronefall recently and it looked really cool, but it also apparently has just a few hours of content. You might enjoy it as a chill experience tho

Wasting away hours with Ostriv. Alpha/ea or not. It's not stressing at all, in default even very slow and can be paused. Goes great with an audio book 👌

Alas activity slowed down a lot recently. Which is not very surprising considering the dev lives in a freakin warzone :-/