- Factorio, I know you said you couldn't get into it, but try peaceful mode, it's a great game even without enemies
- RimWorld, it's an excellent colony management game
- Dwarf Fortress, this is the big boss, it's really hard to start, but it's the most complex simulation game out there. If you can get into it, it's infinite hours of fun.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Factorio. If you like satisfactory and w&r then cracktorio is right up your alley.
There is also a free demo on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/
If you enjoy the base game I would 100% recommend the expansion called Space Age with adds 4 more planets and space flight between them.
I played several factory games which is right up my alley. I know Factorio is the best of all by far, but I couldn't get in to it somehow.
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Have you considered Rimworld or 4x games? Stellaris, in particular, might be up your alley.
++++1 for Rimworld. The first time I really committed to learning to play that game, I lost almost 100 hours in ~3 weeks (which is a ton for me, since I have kids and a job... I lost a lot of sleep). The best part of Rimworld, is if there's a vanilla mechanic you don't like or wish was fleshed out more, there's a 98% chance someone has made a mod for it.
But yeah, it isn't for the faint of heart. It definitely has a learning curve and it isn't super easy to just pick up and play for small amounts here and there. It's a game that you really need at least 1-2 hours per session.
I'd recommend watching a quick start tutorial video before you start playing, as that'll also give you an idea on whether or not you'll like it.
I almost religiously play games without modding, but Rimworld is the major exception - it is simply too good to ignore.
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Stellaris, in particular, might be up your alley.
I like Stellaris quite a bit, but I should note that OP mentioned how he didn't like spending money on DLC. Stellaris follows the typical Paradox approach of creating a lot of DLC to expand and extend the game and its gameplay as long as people are interested in buying it, and winding up with a large game that'll cost you a lot if you want all the DLC. It may be worthwhile, but if one wants to get all the DLC, it's gonna add a fair bit to the price.
(checks Steam)
The base game is $40. Buying every available piece of DLC (and it looks like they're still coming out with more stuff) is another $429.
That being said, I've also got a lot of hours of gameplay out of Stellaris, so that does bring the cost-per-hour down quite a lot. But it depends on how much someone is going to play the thing.
+1 to RimWorld suggestion.
I played Stellaris, also HOI4 but those games were hard to learn, even harder to master.
I'll go check Rimworld, thanks!
Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid. Yeah it may look like the Sims (which oddly is where TIS got their art influence from), but it's pretty darn unforgiving. Hell, I lost my last character without realizing how, chalking it up to some strange drug interaction (aka don't drink and take sleeping pills, kids). Resource management, while not a direct focal point for PZ, is still important as you are watching every aspect of your character's health and wellbeing.
The latest beta build 42 has incorporated some new mechanics and a nicer lighting system so things feel proper spooky when slinking around in the darkness. And don't even get me started on the modding community. Infinite possibilities and a constant influx of new content, some which gets so popular it's adding into the base gameplay. Look up Week One if you want more than just a zed simulator.
I also second Stardew if you are also looking to scratch that cozy gaming itch.
Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid.
It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar "zombie survival" genre game, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it's got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn't hit you with too much at once, but...
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The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It's very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.
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The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm's got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.
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I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don't have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.
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To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill.
Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in .223 (and that's by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it's possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can't fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some with barrels in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, tube magazine, detachable magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you're temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game's martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.
And that's before getting into stuff like sandbox vehicle design and construction (land, water, air, amphibious), power generation and storage, nutrition (weight and its various effects on physical capabilities, body fat, vitamins, calcium intake), artifacts, magic (if you turn on some of the various magic or psionic mods), bionics, mutations, local weather systems, temperature (air and body; you can set up heaters and air conditioners in vehicles), vision in various spectra, monsters tracking scent/vision/noise, fires and building structural failures, brewing, the ability to recruit NPCs and create faction camps, quests, aliens, disease modeling, various types of parasites, fungal infections, various types of poisonings and envenomings, various types of lights, devices with removable batteries, internal-batteries, USB-style (UPS) charging and power that can run off static, vehicle, bionic, or power stations. Solar/wind/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/nuclear power generation. Multi-fuel engines. Multiple-engine vehicles (or, with appropriate electronic systems, hybrid vehicles that can automatically toggle an ICE engine to charge a battery to run electric motors). Seatbelts and harnesses (and being ejected from vehicles in crashes). Folding, portable vehicles. Bike and motorcycle racks on cars. Stimulants, depressants, alcohol. Acetylene and electrical welding. Tons of types of food to cook (looks 547 recipes currently available). The thing is just huge.
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Also Barotrauma
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Seconding Yakuza. There's about 10 games in the series, all are pretty great to amazing. The older ones are all dirt cheap and often go on sale by 50%
Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami or Like a Dragon are all good starting points
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I would like to recommend Dave the Diver, Inscryption and Curious Expedition (first one). All of them are superb indie games. It might not be the genres you're asking for but I would still highly recommend them if you want to try something new.
I loved Dave the diver. Holy shit what an amazing game! I will check out the other titles, Thank you!
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dwarf fortress?
Hmm, how about mindustry (its open source and free outside of steam)? It's like factorio with tower defense. Note: after playing for few hours you might get access to many more stuff in game which might feel overwhelming
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I see no mention of Starsector, there should be mention of Starsector.
Try Starsector.
Not on steam, early 2000's website, gameplay looks nice. This is a win for me. Thanks!
Factorio. Aka cracktorio.
I liked ksp2
If you're saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.
On the "factory" side, maybe some colony simulators? Someone else mentioned Rimworld. That's got a bit of DLC, but I think that even the base game has pretty good value for money. Oxygen Not Included is another colony sim that focuses more on the building/automation/physics side; I think that you'll get a lot of hours out of that.
Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Steep learning curve, but lots of mechanics to explore.
I like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren't going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there's also a commercial build on Steam.
I have not played Elin, the successor to Elona, but it might be worth a look too if you are looking for a game with both a sandbox aspect and RPG aspect.
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Ksp2 was severely botched by Take2.. but if you're into the genre you might want to check out Juno.
In addition you might want to keep an eye out for KSA which is currently in early stages of development. As there's no official website yet, I try to keep on top of any dev updates and nuggets of information so I can update the lemmy community.
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Based on your enjoyment of management and strategy, Paradox's grand strategy games might be something you enjoy. Same publisher as Cities Skylines. There are four main series of them, each with their own mechanics but enough broad-scale similarities that knowing one helps with the others. They are:
- Crusader Kings, set in medieval Europe, North Africa, and about half of Asia. This one is the most roleplay-heavy, as you play as a succession of characters within a feudal dynasty rather than a country
- Europa Universalis, set from the European Renaissance up to the end of the Napoleonic wars. The whole world is playable, and exploration is a big mechanic
- Victoria, which covers the world through the rise of industrialism. This one is the most simulation-heavy, focusing gameplay around economic development and the diplomatic manoeuvring of great powers
- Hearts of Iron, which is the Second World War game. This is the one to go for if you want to play the military side of things
What distinguishes them from strategy games like Civ and Age of Empires is the greatly-reduced abstraction. There's no expectation of every starting point or playable country being balanced; if you start as Belgium in Hearts of Iron, you're going to have to do something clever to not get steamrolled by Germany. There's also no win condition beyond what you set for yourself. When I start a game of Crusader Kings, I'm not trying to win the game, I'm saying to myself "let's see if I can unite all of Britain and Ireland under a Gaelic ruler"
All Paradox games have quite a lot of DLC, but the base games are solid (often now including several of the earlier DLCs for free, in the case of older games) and they go on steep sales pretty often. If there's not a specific time period or mechanic that sways you towards one of the games, I recommend Crusader Kings 3 for the best new player experience
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If you like something more complex, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is pretty good.
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Endless Sky. Open source and crowd developed. Its story lines, assets, and general size have only increased with age. Active Discord server as well (but it's only single player, for now anyway).
Outer Wilds
Stellaris is a great realtime 4x strategy game. They have a lot of paid DLC, but you can pick and choose which modules you want. Some are purely cosmetic options while others make gameplay changes, and they go on sale pretty often. Worst comes to worst, you can usually find the DLC on key sites as well for pretty cheap. Paradox also started a subscription based service that gives you access to the DLCs, maybe you can subscribe for a month and try out which DLCs you like.
Project Zomboid is an incredibly hard resource management survival game. It is also very detailed, meaning you need to maintain everything about your character from their hydration, to their weight and fitness. Its a slow burner type game, but when the action picks up, it gets tense. Its also a "forever" game, in that theoretically, if your character never dies, the game never ends. The map is huge, big enough to feel different pretty much every time you play. Its also multiplayer, which is pretty fun.
Farming Simulator can be a fun, chill game to play. Its not as resource management intensive as a game like Project Zomboid, but it can be a good game to relax with.
Ragnarok Online is an older (2003) MMORPG that I recently discovered, and while I am not much of an MMO Enjoyer (I hate the "Disneyland" or theme park feeling most have where I have to wait in line at NPCs and bosses), Ragnarok Online's player population is consistently low enough to not feel like that while also being high enough to feel like the game is not dead. Just don't play on the official servers from the Steam client. Use a client that connects to private servers, the economy is really bad in the official servers.
King Arthur: Knights Tale is a pretty fun Strategy RPG. I haven't been able to play that much of it, but what I have been able to play was pretty fun. Check it out, it might be interesting to you if you liked Divinity and games with combat like XCOM or Fire Emblem.
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Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don't even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.
My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don't have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don't like something and you can make informed decisions from there.
If you liked BG3 and Divinity 2, I'm obligated to mention the Pathfinder games: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. The graphics are a touch simple, but the writing is great and the detailed character building scratches an itch for me. As far as I'm concerned, Owlcat is currently the only real competition Larian has.
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Some further suggestions I haven't seen mentioned in all these comments yet, surprisingly:
- Foundation
- Manor Lords
- 0 A.D. (FOSS and impossible to get ripped off, AoE clone)
- shapez / shapez 2 (the first one is only $2)
And maybe a little more casual, but still similar vein as city management:
Out of all of these, I think I've played Mini Motorways three times as much as the rest, combined. I dunno why, I just love it.
Factorio. If you enjoyed Satisfactory you should check out the game that created the genre. They have an excellent demo and although it's relatively expensive compared to similar games, it's the best one and runs like an absolute dream even when things get huge where a lot of similar games slow down.
You might enjoy Sid Meier's Civilization games. I'm partial to Civ 6, but they're pretty much all in the same vein of management games.
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Have you tried Oxygen not included? I'm usually not into management games, but it pulled me in.
Often when I am sick of all the things I’ve been playing or feeling uninspired I go for a genre switch. To that end I will always recommend Neir: Replicant and Neir: Automata—I feel like a failure and a fool to have sat on them for so many years. Those are both games that feature very approachable gameplay with the whole deep story and cross genre mechanics that the split fiction devs seem to be good at (and are both single player), just be sure to continue playing after the first (and second and third, etc) credits roll.
Other random suggestions:
Bellwright is a really good colony sim / survival craft combo (although I’ve not played it single player so not sure how great it is in that mode).
Cyberpunk 2077 is just fucking great if you haven’t played that.
Disco Elysium if you’re really looking for some Get Stick Bugged content. (and a fantastic drunk cop RPG)
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This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It's an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.
management / factory games like workers and resources
Maybe Frostpunk would be up your alley?
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Stardew valley. Sea of stars. Kingdom come 2. The anno series. Metaphor re fantazio. The Case of the golden idol. Baldur's Gate 1 &2 enhanced. Planescape torment. Against the storm. Star wars Galactic battlegrounds (it's basically start wars age of empires 2, same engine). Civilization 5 or 6 (I prefer 5 but plenty of people prefer 6, and seems like no one prefers 7). Command and conquer (except 4). Crusader Kings. Europa universalis.
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Railway Empire 2 hard to put down once you get going.
Wasteland 3 is awesome and akin to DOS2 and BG3!
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A classic one would be to go for BG1 and BG2
Then either play the enhanced editions with EET or play the originals with Baldur's Gate Trilogy to allow you to play all three games as a singular campaign (as well as running BG1 in the same engine as BG2 if you go for the originals)
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Check out Elin.
Basebuilding/dungeon crawling/pixel art/roguelike. Kinda like ADOM meets stardew, but weirder and more Japanese. Weirder how? Here's the wiki entry on the chaos shape race, which you can play as.
VERY in depth systems in the game. Mutations, crafting, prayer, it's a deep game.
Oblivion remaster looks pretty good. Have you played through that game before?
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