6 Best Open-World Survival Crafting Games I Love
I am a big fan of open-world survival crafting games. There’s something alluring about pitting yourself against a threatening environment while trying to build a base. And there are a lot of games to choose from.
I often like to just burn an hour relaxing while crafting something new after a long day of work. I can easily spend hours building a new base, house, or just grabbing some virtual bait and going fishing for imaginary fish.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy action and real-time-strategy games as well. But when I just want to relax and unwind at night, I can easily burn more than an hour building a new stone castle in Valheim.
The hardest part is deciding which one I want to dive into next.
6 Top Open-World Survival Crafting Games
Keep in mind that these are games I’ve played myself and enjoy to this day. If you see that something isn’t on this list, feel free to leave a comment. I’m always looking to add more to my library.
These are in no particular order, but are games that I found to be the best value for how I play.
Also, most of these games are available on Steam.
1. Valheim
If you like Norse mythology and Viking lore, Valheim is a great game to buy. This survival crafting game is rife with information regarding the Norse, their gods, and is probably set in one of the largest maps I’ve come across in an open-world survival game.
The point of the game is to slay all of the gods in Valheim, gaining powers as you go. Each god grants a power and something that helps you progress to the next area. For instance, killing the first god, Eikthyr, gives you antlers to turn into a mining pick to mine ore, upgrading your armor from leather to bronze.
As you collect things in the game, you unlock various recipes for crafting. This includes everything from building a house to the types of food you consume. And each biome unlocks more as the game progresses.
In the beginning, you don’t have a lot of crafting options. That’s because you’re meant to explore and collect more items from various biomes stretching the entire world. After putting down the first god, however, things progress quite quickly, and you begin to accumulate a variety of recipes ranging from boats to base decorations.
Valheim has a lot of settings when building the world. And because its maps are gigantic and the biomes plentiful, you can spend hundreds of hours exploring and building without actually progressing the game. This gives Valheim incredible potential for replayability. This is especially true if you ramp it up to hardcore and without a map. The game gets incredibly interesting at that point.
Highlights of Valheim:
- Great for multiplayer exploration
- Base building to the extreme
- Includes a variety of Norse and Viking lore
- Advance the game at your own pace
- Domestication of various creatures
2. V Rising
If you love vampires, V Rising is a good choice. In this game, you’re rebuilding a vampire presence in the lands, taking on a variety of foes while gaining the help of servants loyal to your cause. Well, after “convincing” them to join you, anyway. The story and premise behind V Rising are well-developed, and the game has a lot of unique traits.
The only real drawback is how the game controls. It has a bit of a learning curve and can feel awkward at first, especially when it comes to base building. But once you get the hang of the controls, V Rising is quite enjoyable.
The crafting aspect is probably the most difficult to manage. It can take a bit of time to collect the recipes and the materials to build the crafting devices. And, you can only unlock certain types of building materials after defeating some of the main bosses. All of this has to be done in the shadows, as sunlight is your enemy, as it should be while playing as a vampire.
In the beginning, you don’t have access to a lot of recipes. Exploration, mining, and cutting down trees are key to unlocking some of the base building in this survival game. It could take quite a while to unlock many of the recipes for upgrading your gear. In other words, crafting in V Rising has more of a grind quality than other survival games.
If you don’t mind the grind, there are a few options for replayability. Mostly, I focus on building different bases and castle styles. The different tiles you can use for flooring and whatnot can give each one a very unique presence. V Rising is somewhat open-world, but the map is the same in every game. It’s just a relatively large map, opening all kinds of ways to enjoy setting up a new castle.
If you’re creative enough, you could go so far as to use one of your castle layouts as ideas for tabletop RPGs.
Highlights of V Rising:
- Unique gameplay and storyline
- Fun combat and magic mechanic
- Shapeshifting and other “vampire” abilities
- Beautiful designs for crafting castle decorations
- Interesting enemies and other creatures to battle
3. Subnautica
Subnautica is an underwater survival game with some of the best visual and auditory elements, even when compared to so-called AAA titles and developers. In a nutshell, you are a survivor from the spaceship Aurora after it crashlanded on an alien planet. The plan is to survive until rescued while also discovering that you’re not alone near the crashsite.
The deep-sea landscape was brilliantly designed, and the game easily triggers my own sense of thalasophobia. It’s one of the reasons why I bought it shortly after it became available.
You don’t have a ton of options when it comes to crafting compared to other survival builder games. However, the base pieces allow for some interesting creations when putting together an underwater fortress. I find myself creating all kinds of bases in different locations with varying floor plans simply because I like variety.
Before you can craft most of the recipes, you’ll need to discover them. This means using a hand-held scanner and sifting through the debris on the ocean floor. You can also find a lot of decorations and recipes on the Aurora when you attempt to fix the reactor core early in the game.
While the map itself is not incredibly huge, there are plenty of places to explore that are outside of the game’s main storyline. Better yet, you can progress through the story at your own pace. Since all of the materials are discoverable, you can find everything needed to dive deep into the end-game biomes before actually following the distress calls, which drive the story forward.
For me, the replayability comes in the form of creating various types of bases. Some are more elaborate than others, and at one time, I had roughly five different Seamoths, all named after Runabouts from Deep Space 9…because I’m a dork.
Highlights of Subnautica:
- Beautifully developed game, both visuals and sound
- Elements of fear in the darker parts of the ocean
- Lots of areas to explore, if you’re brave enough
- Easy to manage crafting system
- Can be a quick or slow-burning game
4. Raft
Among my most-played crafting survival games is Raft. You are lost at sea, standing on a couple of small cubes made of wood and plastic. The idea is to find civilization and your family across a waterworld of what remains of Earth after the ice caps melted. Using a basic hook to collect debris, you begin building your raft to accommodate life on the water.
Raft is another game that you can spend hours playing before reaching the first major island in the storyline. As you collect items and recipes from barrels and crates, you can flesh out your floating base in a vast number of ways. You can build everything from catamarans to tankers if you wish.
You’ll also want to pay attention to your food and drink meters. Letting them go can start to make you sick, which then makes you slow to walk. It’s very inconvenient when you’re trying to fight off a shark that is trying to dismantle your raft by chewing on it.
During the game, you’ll find large islands with more resources and trading posts. This will increase what you can do and what you can build while playing. For instance, there are some food recipes you can only get from the trading posts. So, it’s worth exploring every island you come across.
Raft has a long list of things you can build. From creating a floating fortress to decorating a dining hall, there are quite a few options to give your “ship” the ambience you want. If that’s not enough, you can collect flowers of different colors to create paint. My daughter was able to recreate the Colorado state flag on the deck of our ship.
Although the story is quite straightforward, the replayability comes in the form of building your raft and the world itself. It’s never the same, as islands are generated randomly as you float along. The main islands are the same, but you have to find them using the locations found in previous areas. So, it’s easy to feel like it’s a new world with every load.
Highlights of Raft:
- Battling sharks, boars, bears, and shriekers to survive
- Extensive building capabilities for your raft
- Amazing soundtrack as you float along
- Fun random visuals, such as dolphins, sea turtles, and manta rays.
- A very relaxing game if you just need a moment to yourself
5. Minecraft
My daughters got me playing Minecraft back in the day on the Xbox 360. Nowadays, it’s one of my go-tos for simple relaxation or action adventure. That’s because of the versatility Minecraft offers its players. You go play the vanilla version endlessly, even after slaying the Ender Dragon. Or, you can add one of many mods to expand what it offers.
It’s difficult to really break down the progression and benefits of Minecraft because of the mods you can add. You can do everything from exploring the depths to find bones to build Jurassic Park, to dialing up a Stargate and exploring other planets. The flexibility of Minecraft is unmatched when it comes to how and what you can play.
There aren’t a lot of recipes in vanilla Minecraft as you would think of them. You can create a lot of things in the game with certain blocks while putting other materials together to make weapons and items. Most of the more elaborate recipes come from the mods.
For example, Sky Factory 4 has a huge list of recipes, requiring other materials you craft throughout the game. It can take a minute to build a solar array to power your base.
The mods and the way the Minecraft world generates give it massive potential for replaying the game. If you play the Java version, the maps are virtually never-ending. You can build a new castle or home base in every biome and never see your spawn point ever again.
Highlights of Minecraft:
- Family-friendly for all ages
- Extremely long list of supported mods to add
- Massive community for all kinds of information
- Great for relaxed playthroughs or extreme action
- Easy to build your own modded world instance
6. Fallout 4? Really?
One of the reasons why Fallout 4 is the most played game I have on Steam is because of the crafting and survival aspects. Although you can play through the story at your own pace, you can literally sit in a single settlement indefinitely, building structures and defenses. Set in post-apocolyptic earth 200 years after the bombs fell, it’s all about surviving raiders, mutants, and everything else the wasteland tosses at you.
If you play the vanilla survival setting of Fallout 4, the difficulty is ramped up as you need to pay attention to food, water, sickness, sleep, and more, all while trying to gather enough materials to build your base. It’s actually my preferred way to play. However, I use a mod to get rid of the sickness and parasites.
Fallout 4 offers quite a few building and crafting recipes, especially when it comes to weapons and armor. You can modify most of the weapons in the game for varying purposes, and most of the armors can be adjusted to provide better protection from certain types of damage. And, of course, mods add even more recipes for survival and crafting in the game.
For me, I’ve found quite a bit of replayability in the settlement and base-building aspects of the game. I’m constantly looking for new ways to set up a home base or equip my settlers. You can actually get a lot out of the game aside from the actual quest lines.
If you want more things to do, though, there are always the DLCs and the long list of mods you can add for free. Well, that is, unless Bethesda does something in the future that breaks the game again.
Regardless, Fallout 4 has a lot to offer for those looking for survival crafting games. Just keep in mind that it is Bethesda, and the crafting can be a little wonky at times, thanks to the game’s engine.
Highlights of Fallout 4:
- A variety of mods that can ultimately change how you craft bases
- A long list of legendary weapons and armor that offer varying abilities
- Several settlements are available to build your home base any way you like
- Lots of fun lore to read at many locations on the map
- Good or bad alignment…play it your way
Survival Crafting Games On My Radar
There are a lot of open-world survival games that include base building. Unfortunately, I don’t often have the money to buy the games I want to try.
Nonetheless, I am building a list of the best survival crafting games I can find on Steam that I plan on trying in the near future.
Here are some that have piqued my interest. Keep in mind that I’m not saying these are the best. These are simply games I am looking forward to trying that have crafting and base-building mechanics.
- No Man’s Sky
- Icarus
- Once Human
- Rust
- Sunkenland
- Green Hell
- Return to Moria
- Aska
- Enshrouded
- The Last Caretaker
- Rift Breaker
If you have a building survival game you’d like me to try or include in this list, feel free to leave a comment. As I said before, I’m always looking to try new things and add to my library.
What Is Your Favorite Genre of Game?
I love crafting and base-building games, especially those that offer a relaxed and slow-paced experience. Mostly, that’s because I often want to just sit back and let my imagination fill in the blanks while putting something together.
It’s a nice way to unwind after an incredibly stressful day. In a world where you don’t have a lot under your control, survival crafting games can give you some of that feeling back.
What kind of games do you play to help you unwind?
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