Kenshi. Take a look at it. You control people in a very active world, but you build settlements and mine iron, stone and copper and build things, and explore to get more research to build better things and improve your people so they can build even bigger and better things. Deep lore if you like that as well, but easy to ignore.
If your into the space vibes Empyrion Galactic Survival is a great one that goes from mining by hand to mining vehicles to asteroid mining with huge ships!
Vintage Story. It is a survival game built by former Minecraft modders. It has pretty detailed metal crafting. You have to forge your items and then shape them on an anvil
On one hand I love vintage story’s focus on realism, on the other hand crafting and smelting stuff takes forever I sometimes wish it were as simple as minecraft. It’s cool the first few times but if I have to make another pot or heat up my metals and wack them a million times I’m going insane.
I agree, if it was that alone it would be fantastic imo but the hostile fauna AND the Lovecraft demons that spawn make it so frustrating sometimes. Being unable to find tin and dieing to wolves an hour away from base (with no stock way of finding your body) is what made me stop my last run and I haven’t picked it up in about a year.
Oh yeah, I played it very small scale many years ago and never got into pvp or large scale competitive building so I only had local stories to keep me entertained. Had a small base with a few friends and we'd trade beeswax for low quality ores from a nearby big village so we could get some metal tools since we didn't have access to a mine.
It was always so exciting loading a chest full of valuables (to us at least it was a fortune), carrying it a boat, traveling 5-10 minutes down river to a big settlement and then yelling and trading outside of their gate. Then they carry out their goods while you anxiously wait there, not allowed to enter their big city 😅
The pvp, botting, cheaters and general dev attitude really turned me off that game but I'll always have fond memories of it.
I’ve identified good progression systems as the main thing I like about games with crafting. You make something which enables you to get the next best thing, repeat.
Notable examples are Terraria, (modded) Minecraft to some degree, Runescape (no bias towards OSRS or RS3), Monster Hunter series, various MMO’s, Subnautica, ARK and Forager.
Factorio, although it’s more about automating those things. Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, which are 3d versions of the same concept.
If you want more of a creating bench style, there’s a whole crop of games under the “open world survival craft” genre such as valheim, raft, rust, project zomboid, green hell, and so on.
I liked how crafting in Shroud of the Avatar was setup somewhat realistically, even if it was tedious as fuck. Real life is also tedious as fuck. Like you actually put the metal in a forge, heat it, pound it, etc. Like all the steps for making the thing you’re making from mining the ore, smelting and refining it, and then using the metal to make stuff.
Try Stationeers, if you like difficulty. Smelting single metals is easy, but having to smelt ores at a specific temp and pressure to create alloys is hard, especially if you have to first manufacture the gas that heats it.
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