Here are the best building games on Steam!
After traversing many worlds where you can destroy everything, you now want to play games that let you build things up from the ground. You're done shattering the countless dreams and lives of virtual people and want to go to worlds where you can build civilizations and noteworthy structures.
The world of building games isn't all about just building cities and skylines, many can be idle sandboxes with no actual goal. Conversely, they can also be stressful managing games of your own making. Building games on Steam comes in many formats, and you're sure to find what you're looking for.
You can build anything out of Terraria, and you'll find a lot of players mastering the art of building epic structures. You'll get to that level one day once you manage to fight off corruption and crimson from getting to you first.
Imagination is crucial, but so is having the right tools and understanding that your environment is out to kill you and your NPCs.
Despite many players posting about their proudest works, most of those gigantic structures didn't come without hard work. There are mods that will let you just build on Terraria, but that takes away half the fun and thrill of surviving and building things beyond your imagination.
If you want pure, unbridled ragdoll physics fun, then Garry's Mod should be your priority. You can play it all alone and get lost in your weirdly constructed world, or play with others and create all sorts of strange contraptions that are bound to fall apart.
There's no specific objective in the game, which is why you can play it in any way you want. Whether that's fun or scary is up for you to judge, especially with a lot of players turning the game into a battle royal or a horror dungeon.
You really don't want the hustle of adventure building, and you're not into the chaos of ragdoll physics. That's alright because Townscaper will satisfy your simple, city-building cravings without any extra frills thrown into it.
You're just putting up quaint structures in the middle of the water and building a civilization out of them.
There are no goals, and you can do anything you want with these structures. Stack towers as tall as possible, write letters out of roads, put buildings far apart—it won't matter because there are no people to complain about your unique urban planning methods.
Forget idle gaming, you want to survive like how your ancestors did eons ago—or at least experience it in a video game without the consequence of dying permanently. In many ways, Kenshi isn't the first thing you think of when you think of a building sim.
But it is, and it takes the building part seriously since you start out with literally nothing—save for a few pieces of underwear.
The primary goal is to survive in your post-apocalyptic world, and then build with what you have. You can become the strongest person currently known to humanity, or spend hours in the game building up your life and getting better at whatever it is you want to.
Why build another concrete jungle where dreams are trampled if you can build an actual jungle? Planet Zoo's name is self-explanatory, and you'll be building your own zoo and have your own jungle utopia. But there's a managing aspect to it, and you'll have to maintain your zoo and attend to guests all while expanding your zoo.
Your ideas will be freed from your mind since you can manipulate the land around you and lay down paths however you like. You'll probably never own a zoo in your lifetime or live among the big cats of the Sahara without getting mauled, so Planet Zoo is the best way to satisfy your zookeeper dreams.
Building the theme park of your dreams is a hard task, even in a game. Planet Coaster isn't easy, and you'll deal with what a lot of Disneyland employees do on a daily. They probably witnessed stranger things happen in Disneyland compared to your fresh save of Planet Coaster, though.
You'll deal with unruly visitors and logistical problems, but the silver lining to all of those challenges is your power to terraform the happiest place on earth. The building part is fun, and some streamers have gone as far as building ridiculous and unusable parks for dares, but the management is the most hectic part of the game.
Maybe you're frustrated with your urban reality and wish to live in a walkable city with fresher air and greater sights. Cities: Skylines is a classic city builder, but you'll feel like a mayor more than just the city's founder.
You'll be creating policies and maintaining the city, which is just as hard as it sounds.
You'll be building the city of your dreams while experiencing the hardships of keeping it great. You'll be fighting natural disasters, planning business and residential areas, and fending off the age-old enemy of every urban city: traffic.
But at least you won't have anybody to blame but yourself if your city turns out terribly.
If anything's sure, you'll build a better submarine in Subnautica than most submersibles that charge you $250,000 for a trip to long sunken ships. Some feel horror from this game since it's set deep into the ocean along with its mysteries, and some mods make it intentionally scarier.
But Subnautica is actually a building sim that makes the impossible task of creating an intricate underwater base virtually possible. There's a lot of underwater exploration you'll have to do so that you can build your base, so play at your own risk if you fear the deep sea.
Valheim will make you survive in a dangerous world starting with only the clothes on your back and no tools. Valheim is not safe, and many players die in the first few minutes of the game while trying to get a grasp of their new environment.
But for all the things you need to survive, it's also a building game at its core.
You can build your first base while listening to its soothing and scenic music. Forget that trolls and skeletons are coming after you for a moment and just focus on building the high-rise apartment and its surrounding village you've always dreamed of having.
If you're not here to build for aesthetics but for pure strategy, RimWorld will give you what you're looking for. It's a base-building game at its finest, and you'll feel like a god above your colony more than just a creator. Maybe it's the view from above, but having control over a bunch of people and their world is as god-mode as it can be.
You'll have to make your base as efficient as possible and as resilient to the world's whims. Anything and everything can happen in this game, and maximizing the best layouts will make life easier for your people.
If Kenshi and Valheim spared your dignity by letting you spawn with some clothes, Rust is the definition of starting with absolutely nothing. Not even clothes, you just spawn at a random location probably with a rock in hand.
Everything you do after is up to you, and maybe you'll get to build something monumental.
That's if your world and other players haven't successfully killed you. To build a base is already a great feat when most players die upon waking up to somebody bashing their head with a rock.
By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.
Vans is a graduate from the University of Asia and the Pacific with a degree in Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy. She has many roles in life: artist, retired debater, and mother of a cat, to name a few. Through the power of iced coffee, she writes articles that expose her passion for hack-and-slash games, as well as JRPGs.
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After traversing many worlds where you can destroy everything, you now want to play games that let you build things up from the ground. You're done shattering the countless dreams and lives of virtual people and want to go to worlds where you can build civilizations and noteworthy structures.
The world of building games isn't all about just building cities and skylines, many can be idle sandboxes with no actual goal. Conversely, they can also be stressful managing games of your own making. Building games on Steam comes in many formats, and you're sure to find what you're looking for.
You can build anything out of Terraria, and you'll find a lot of players mastering the art of building epic structures. You'll get to that level one day once you manage to fight off corruption and crimson from getting to you first.
Imagination is crucial, but so is having the right tools and understanding that your environment is out to kill you and your NPCs.
Despite many players posting about their proudest works, most of those gigantic structures didn't come without hard work. There are mods that will let you just build on Terraria, but that takes away half the fun and thrill of surviving and building things beyond your imagination.
If you want pure, unbridled ragdoll physics fun, then Garry's Mod should be your priority. You can play it all alone and get lost in your weirdly constructed world, or play with others and create all sorts of strange contraptions that are bound to fall apart.
There's no specific objective in the game, which is why you can play it in any way you want. Whether that's fun or scary is up for you to judge, especially with a lot of players turning the game into a battle royal or a horror dungeon.
You really don't want the hustle of adventure building, and you're not into the chaos of ragdoll physics. That's alright because Townscaper will satisfy your simple, city-building cravings without any extra frills thrown into it.
You're just putting up quaint structures in the middle of the water and building a civilization out of them.
There are no goals, and you can do anything you want with these structures. Stack towers as tall as possible, write letters out of roads, put buildings far apart—it won't matter because there are no people to complain about your unique urban planning methods.
Forget idle gaming, you want to survive like how your ancestors did eons ago—or at least experience it in a video game without the consequence of dying permanently. In many ways, Kenshi isn't the first thing you think of when you think of a building sim.
But it is, and it takes the building part seriously since you start out with literally nothing—save for a few pieces of underwear.
The primary goal is to survive in your post-apocalyptic world, and then build with what you have. You can become the strongest person currently known to humanity, or spend hours in the game building up your life and getting better at whatever it is you want to.
Why build another concrete jungle where dreams are trampled if you can build an actual jungle? Planet Zoo's name is self-explanatory, and you'll be building your own zoo and have your own jungle utopia. But there's a managing aspect to it, and you'll have to maintain your zoo and attend to guests all while expanding your zoo.
Your ideas will be freed from your mind since you can manipulate the land around you and lay down paths however you like. You'll probably never own a zoo in your lifetime or live among the big cats of the Sahara without getting mauled, so Planet Zoo is the best way to satisfy your zookeeper dreams.
Building the theme park of your dreams is a hard task, even in a game. Planet Coaster isn't easy, and you'll deal with what a lot of Disneyland employees do on a daily. They probably witnessed stranger things happen in Disneyland compared to your fresh save of Planet Coaster, though.
You'll deal with unruly visitors and logistical problems, but the silver lining to all of those challenges is your power to terraform the happiest place on earth. The building part is fun, and some streamers have gone as far as building ridiculous and unusable parks for dares, but the management is the most hectic part of the game.
Maybe you're frustrated with your urban reality and wish to live in a walkable city with fresher air and greater sights. Cities: Skylines is a classic city builder, but you'll feel like a mayor more than just the city's founder.
You'll be creating policies and maintaining the city, which is just as hard as it sounds.
You'll be building the city of your dreams while experiencing the hardships of keeping it great. You'll be fighting natural disasters, planning business and residential areas, and fending off the age-old enemy of every urban city: traffic.
But at least you won't have anybody to blame but yourself if your city turns out terribly.
If anything's sure, you'll build a better submarine in Subnautica than most submersibles that charge you $250,000 for a trip to long sunken ships. Some feel horror from this game since it's set deep into the ocean along with its mysteries, and some mods make it intentionally scarier.
But Subnautica is actually a building sim that makes the impossible task of creating an intricate underwater base virtually possible. There's a lot of underwater exploration you'll have to do so that you can build your base, so play at your own risk if you fear the deep sea.
Valheim will make you survive in a dangerous world starting with only the clothes on your back and no tools. Valheim is not safe, and many players die in the first few minutes of the game while trying to get a grasp of their new environment.
But for all the things you need to survive, it's also a building game at its core.
You can build your first base while listening to its soothing and scenic music. Forget that trolls and skeletons are coming after you for a moment and just focus on building the high-rise apartment and its surrounding village you've always dreamed of having.
If you're not here to build for aesthetics but for pure strategy, RimWorld will give you what you're looking for. It's a base-building game at its finest, and you'll feel like a god above your colony more than just a creator. Maybe it's the view from above, but having control over a bunch of people and their world is as god-mode as it can be.
You'll have to make your base as efficient as possible and as resilient to the world's whims. Anything and everything can happen in this game, and maximizing the best layouts will make life easier for your people.
If Kenshi and Valheim spared your dignity by letting you spawn with some clothes, Rust is the definition of starting with absolutely nothing. Not even clothes, you just spawn at a random location probably with a rock in hand.
Everything you do after is up to you, and maybe you'll get to build something monumental.
That's if your world and other players haven't successfully killed you. To build a base is already a great feat when most players die upon waking up to somebody bashing their head with a rock.
By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.
Vans is a graduate from the University of Asia and the Pacific with a degree in Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy. She has many roles in life: artist, retired debater, and mother of a cat, to name a few. Through the power of iced coffee, she writes articles that expose her passion for hack-and-slash games, as well as JRPGs.
source