Mods - I am not sure how to read the rule against game suggestions. If it means no asking for suggestions please just wipe the post. No harm, no foul.
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Fall is usually my busiest time of year preparing for winter in our little forest home. But I have been given orders from the doctors to basically take bedrest for up to 3 months, but I’m allowed to be sitting up… So books and games are basically all that is on the menu.
I enjoy automation games, tower defense, survival/building games, and exploration games.
I dislike ‘souls-like’ experiences where combat is tight and requires perfect timing. In fact in most games where combat can be disabled I usually do that.
My top games of all time would be factorio, minecraft, WoW/FFXIV (yeah… i know. But they count as one), Dyson sphere program, vampire survivors (and many of that type), and gemcraft type TD games.
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Some games that have been recommended and tried, but don’t work for me right now or I have already finished:
mindustry, satisfactory, valheim, no man’s sky, alchemy factory, luanti, terraria.
Thanks in advance for your time. Much appreciated.
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The Planet Crafter might be your jam.
Thanks!
I grabbed most of the demos for the recs here yesterday and that one is the first one I’ll be trying today. Hopefully I have the energy after a few hours of work to come review what I try…
I loved minmaxing and grinding around in Grim Dawn and Timberborn. You might too. 👌
Both solid recs. Added Grim Dawn to the list!
If you want a fresh jaunt in an mmorpg I highly recommend Guild Wars 2. Starter accounts are free so no cost in trying it. Amazing story, plenty of content, and the best community of any multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Hope you give it a try!
Thanks! I did play some GW:2 a long long time ago. I had to look. yeah … LONG.
Maybe it is time again.
Cheers
I found Journey to a Savage Planet and it’s sequel enjoyable, FPS puzzle platformer where you explore and document the local flora and fauna.
The Isle is a nice time sink, you play as a dinosaur and have to grow and survive, maybe live long enough to start a little dino family. You want to change the game version to Envirma (sic) as that is the version currently getting developed.
Ooh interesting. Added to the list! Thank you.
Timberborn definitely. Also, Factorio, which has a better balance of simplicity, complexity, and interface automation than Satisfactory or Mindustry, as well as a different goal. Also mods lmao
I probably should have been more clear about cracktorio - It is on my list of top games because it is my most played game of all time. Possibly even surpassing the MMOs from my 20s.
Definitely a solid rec - but I’m on a factorio break right now with over 6k hours under my engineer’s belt.
My favorite game to play when I am sick is Banished, a medieval city building game that was the labor of love of a solo dev. It starts off quite brutally difficult until you learn the best ways to handle the first winters and then it becomes a cozy opportunity for optimization, and a challenge to balance expanding the city as much as you can while supporting the population with agricultural and forestry goods. It’s inspired some other games to follow in its footsteps, and it has a modding community still making content for it.
I have been known to dabble a bit in banished. I think my wife is in the 2k hours bucket on that one. Super great game.
I’ve been having a blast playing Pikmin 3 using the Eden switch emulator.
Hrm no idea what that is. I’ll check it out. Thanks.
If you’ve never tried it before, Dot Age is a fun little time sink made by an Indie dev. It’s a city builder people/resource management type game where you’re trying to build a successful village to survive a coming apocalypse. You have to plan ahead and deal with upcoming ‘bad events.’ A run is like 5-6 hours long and there is a lot of variety between runs thanks to building variants, etc.
That sounds perfect. Snagged!
GregTech New Horizons mod pack for Minecraft. There’s thousands of hours of automation entertainment there.
Hmm I have been out of MC for a while. I’ll definitely check this out. Thanks.
Don’t be discouraged by the starting difficulty and ridiculous crafting chains (laugh at how ridiculous they are instead). There’s plenty of quality of life in there to make it less painful.
I would suggest to start with the 2.9 beta instead of 2.8.4, they improved a lot of the painful things at the start of the game.
Btw if you don’t like combat absolutely play in peaceful and change configs to make it less dark or straight up cheat items in if it becomes too grindy for you.
It’s a 2000 hour journey not a sprint and there’s plenty of content even if you cheat in resources or (tier-appropriate) items.
A similar modpack I am playing and I can reccommend is Star technology. It’s a gregtech-based skyblock mod. It’s very nice if you think GTNH is too painful.
Hell yeah! It will be one of the firsdt ones I try today. I like a grind. I don’t like a rush. This sounds perfect.
I know you’ve said Satisfactory and Mindustry… but I can’t believe no one has suggested Factorio…
That game is good at keeping me up at night til 2am wanting to expand and remake my factory.
You can think of it like 2D satisfactory, but there’s much more of a base defense mechanic because you get periodically rushed at by groups of bugs annoyed at your pollution.
I think I buried factorio in my post but should have put more emphasis on it. I love factorio. Will always. But I need a break.
A Vampire Survivors-like game I really enjoyed was Death Must Die. Its cheap, the systems and character types are really fleshed out, and progression feels good. It is still in Early Access as the Dev is still adding more zones but I’ve put about 40 hrs into it so far and I have been totally satisfied
Great rec! I actually have that installed. I’ve been tryting demos of a lot of the games people in the thread have mentioned but now I’m waiting on one to install, maybe I’ll fire up dome DMD.
Cheers.
If you enjoy automation, tower defense, survival/building games Rimworld might be of interest to you. Enjoying committing war crimes is optional but a nice bonus!
I have fought against rimworld for many years for fear of being subsumed entirely by the game. but thst is kind of what I need right now isn’t it? Top of the list!
thx!
Caves of Qud is one of the best exploration games I’ve ever played. It’s a traditional roguelike where the overworld map is the same each time but the world history, factions, and most individual zones are procedurally generated each time you start over.
You play as either a mutated human with strange bonuses like extra arms, the ability to mind control, wings, etc. or a Truekin that starts with higher base stats and the ability to use implant tech to do things like replace your legs with tank treads or your eyes with night-vision goggles.
It’s a deep simulation; all of the NPCs in the game are as fully modeled as the player character, the NPCs you meet are a result of the generated history, and the best choice is often to run away.
It’s turn-based with multiple difficulty levels. I recommend playing on classic, but the other ways are just as valid.
I really want to enjoy it, but that game, and dwarf fortress are just too much for me. I just get overloaded with information and I don’t enjoy it.
It’s definitely not for everyone, but once you begin to understand the systems there’s nothing else like it.
This seems really cool! Thank you for sharing.
I’m really into souls games so I’m going to focus my recommendations to games with little combat and also tailor the list based on what you tried and didn’t like so far.
Optional or minimal combat
- Green Hell
- My Summer Car [AI generated paintings]
- Potion Craft
- Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
- Subnautica [controversy with dev buyout and lawsuit, but a solid game]
Combat required but easy
- Yakuza Kiwami (the other yakuza and like a dragon games are great too but some of them might have kernel level rootkits, and some are available on GOG without rootkits)
- Final Fantasy 12 The Zodiac Age
Exploration focused
Story focused games (non exploration)
Worth trying
Subnautica devs vs publisher game controversy is resolved in favor of game devs by court. It’s ok to buy nr 2 now.
Wow that is a great reply. I will look into all of these that I have not tried yet.
I really enjoyed dave the diver and stray. Disliked disco elysium (I know. that is on me, not the game). And for some reason subnautica seems daunting/dangerous to me but I’ll check it out a bit more.
Subnautica can be considered to have some horror elements. Especially for beginners. However, as you play it and unlock technology you realize it’s not actually too bad.
You can play it at your own pace, just do the minimum yo unlock the next thing and so forth.
Mars First Logistics is a fairly tricky building/exploration game where you make and operate robots from parts to explore the world to get more parts. What you get out of it depends a lot on how you play it.
Designing a new vehicle for each task makes it more of a building game.
Trying to reuse/modify the same vehicle for every task makes it more of a driving/operating game.
Choosing tasks based on what you can already do makes it more of an exploration/road trip game.
If you build infrastructure to get everywhere it’s more of an expand/exploit/city building game.
Very interesting concept. I’ll take a look. Thanks!
