So I started playing Terraria again after the last update. I’ve been playing this quite a while and according to Steam I have over 1500 hours playing time. Some of it was from young people playing it, but most of the play time is mine.
Obviously I love this game, the exploration, building, combat, crafting, etc. It’s just really well made and the fact that it’s still being updated is awesome. However, after this many hours in it I’d really like to find something else with a similar style.
I’ve been playing Starbound since the beta came out and it has some similar elements to terraria, but it doesn’t quite fit my needs. Craft the World seems similar in many ways, but you have minions that show up periodically, and you don’t directly control them. Although you can assign them tasks, your role is more of the evil overlord than a controllable char. Lot of nit-picky little issues building the dwarves shelter, it takes too long to get the shelter, beds, food, etc up and running, and the night-time attacks seem to ramp up faster than I can upgrade my gear.
I can’t remember the name of this Terraria clone of the top of my head. You started with a small escape pod crash landing on a new world, and there were bizzare and funny monsters in it, like a giant robot chicken boss. The game seemed promising but I think it got stuck in development hell.
Can someone recommend anything that strongly resembles Terraria gameplay and pacing? Single player for PC please, a Steam version with Xbox controller support would be great!
If you don’t mind 3D, it’s a huge genre: Minecraft (of course), Subnautica, Enshrouded, Valheim, Palworld, StarRepture, Dysmantle, Void Train, The Last Caretaker, Once Human, etc., in the Open World Survival Craft tag.
There’s also games that focus more on the ARPG side of that balance (meaning it has some light crafting/building, but that isn’t as central a focus as in Terraria; they’re more about the action and leveling), like:
And special mention to RPG/RTS hybrid The Riftbreaker on Steam, where you’re building an entire base like in the old Command & Conquer or Starcraft games, alongside harvesting and improving your main char.
Personally, of all the games I listed above, the only one that I loved as much as Terraria (and had anywhere near the same playtime) was Once Human on Steam. It’s still an open-world survival game, but it’s very different: It’s technically a MMO-lite (but you can play it solo just fine, or with friends, or on a private server) and it’s 100% free aside from cosmetics or private servers. It’s in 3D, and the base-building part of it is a lot of fun (in fact I spend the most time doing). You gradually craft better and better weapons after unlocking blueprints for them and gathering the right materials, and the bosses are fun. The writing is not great, not terrible (it’s a Chinese game with English translations and medciore voiceovers). But I found the combination of exploration, gunplay, and base-building (especially showing off in multiplayer, but I guess that’s not your thing) to be a really nice balance I haven’t seen in any games since Terraria.
If you want it to be strictly single player but don’t mind 3D, Subnautica would be my 2nd choice, for having really nailed that cool “new world” exploration feel. Journey To The Savage Planet on Steam is like a sillier take on it. Enshrouded has good building mechanics (including being able to dig and build underground and above), but it’s set in a generic-ish sword and sorcery world that’s much less interesting. But really, in 3D, that genre is super overcrowded with maybe a couple dozen excellent games and hundreds of merely OK or worse ones.
For pure gameplay similarity, it’d probably be Core Keeper or SteamWorld Dig. (Or Minecraft, but presumably you already played that.)
Dwarf Fortress is…a challenge to say the least. They updated the graphics a few years ago but still…old school.
RimWorld is great. A more “approachable” game akin to Dwarf Fortress but it is still a lot to handle.
Neither of those are like Terraria though. Starbound is the closest and OP has played it already.
The others listed might do the trick but none are really “like” Terraria. They just have some elements that might be similar (although I have not played all of them…Don’t Starve Together is great but hits you in the feels).
I asked my AI and it came up with this list. Grain of salt and all that. I have not played all of them (some, but not all):
Summary Table
Game
Building/Crafting
Boss Fights
Exploration
Roguelite
2D Side-Scroll
Core Keeper
Strong
Yes
Yes
No
(Top-down)
Hollow Knight
No
Strong
Strong
No
Yes
Vintage Story
Very Deep
Limited
Yes
No
(3D)
Spelunky 2
No
Yes
Strong
Yes
Yes
Dead Cells
No
Strong
Yes
Yes
Yes
Oxygen Not Included
(Colony)
Limited
Yes
No
(2D sim)
My overall pick for someone who loves Terraria’s full package: Start with Core Keeper — it’s the most direct heir to the Terraria formula. Then play Hollow Knight for the pure exploration/combat experience done at an extraordinarily high level. You really can’t go wrong with either.
Necesse is pretty much a Terraria clone from an isometric perspective. It isn’t a colony game like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. If anything, it’s too close to Terreria for what you want.
After the runaway success of Terraria and Minecraft, the genre is oversaturated with titles now. It’s times like these that Steam Peek can be useful for scanning through a large number of titles at once.
I will second two suggestions already here and give you a new third…
First of all subnautica is amazing. If you like the resource gathering games, subnautica is for you, you gather resources under the ocean and you use them to build an upgrade your stuff to better explore the ocean and get to deeper depths. Amazing game that I could put hours into and there are three of them, there’s two already out… And a third sequel coming out soon.
I will also second the suggestion for Hollow Knight above. Hollow Knight does not have crafting but it is a phenomenal game. I did not expect to like it but I wound up loving it, the only problem I find with it is it’s really difficult. It’s hard. It’s not going to hold your hand, it’s going to thrust you into a hard game from the start…but there are so many powers that you unlock and upgradable items that it’s not funny… It’s like a metroidvania game where you can go off screen left or right and often up or down as long as you have the powers to reach those areas, and can explore a huge landscape that continues to grow over the entire course of the game.
And lastly I will throw in the suggestion of Stardew Valley which I’m surprised nobody has suggested yet. It’s like a farming Sim only it’s much better, it’s like the old Harvest Moon games used to be, if you ever played them. You meet many people in a town, like 23 or 25 people, and nearby the town is your farm which you run and you can craft things, you can make things, you can explore, you can use every day to do what you wish. You can take days off that you wish, you can work all the time, you can go into town and talk with the people, some you can build relationships with, others you can have romance with, people change what they say and where they are depending on what day of the week it is, and as you grow relationships with people they also change in personality to be warmer towards you. It’s a really great game that has thought of pretty much everything, I find, and even when the two years are up that most people play, you can play an additional two years over and over… I have seen some people on my friends list on steam put over 500 hours into this game. I think you might like it if you have never tried it.
Necesse, Starbound, and Core Keeper are closest to Terraria gameplay and pacing. But for what it’s worth, none of them captured that elusive Terraria magic for me; they all felt like clones rather than like something original and creative.
If you want something with very strong exploration, building, combat, and crafting, as said elsewhere, this is a full genre. My recommendation has very different graphics and mood, but it excels at all of these factors: Enshrouded. You start off small with a tiny base, and you find different NPCs who will come join you at your base and help you with your crafting. There’s much more emphasis on combat, but also the base-building is really well-designed.
I think Satisfactory is a different enough genre (factory game) that it’s not really a Terraria-like anymore. The focus is on supply chain management and automation rather than exploration, combat, and character progression.
Minecraft is a big No for me.
I did play a really cool FPS style terraria type a while back, Planet Explorers (338 hours on Steam), and it ended on a big cliffhanger about the main part of the continent being the next step. So I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for a sequel, I loved this game.
I do have Hollow Knight (310 hours on steam and one of the best games ever), Stardew Valley (216 hours), Game of Dwarves, Crea (this is probably closest to Terraria), Niffelhelm, and Sheltered.
Haven’t played Satisfactory but one of my nephews keeps telling me to get it. If anyone has played Satisfactory and Factorio, how similar are they? I have the impression Satisfactory is kind of a 3d FPS type builder and Factorio was similar kind of builder, but top down?
I did get Subnautica as a birthday present a while back but it somehow got lost in the shuffle and I haven’t played it. It’s installed and ready to go now, I’ll check it out.
I’ll go over the list on Steam, Necesse and Core Keeper seem to be closest to what I’m looking for. Dwarf Fortress is somewhat intimidating, but Rimworld sounds like it might be easier to get rolling. Thank you everyone for the recommendations!
Hollow Knight has a sequel that’s out now, by the way, it’s called Silksong. It has many callbacks to the first one trying to take place in the same universe, and you play as the female who was in hollow Knight.
So if you think that’s one of the best games of all time, check out Silksong sometime.
They’re both excellent games; it depends on what you’re looking for.
Satisfactory has 3d building, and is gorgeous, and is genuinely delightful to move through. Its storyline is also a lot better.
Factorio is top-down, has an effectively infinite map, and has more interesting combat and base defense. The vehicles are more fun.
I definitely prefer Satisfactory, but know plenty of folks that prefer Factorio.
All that said, Subnautica is one of the best games ever made IMO, so I’m always delighted to hear that people are getting into it! Its main drawback is the lack of a map, so if you get stuck looking for a resource, don’t be afraid to use the wiki.
DSP is much more approachable (from a quality of life perspective) than Factorio, while Shapez distilled the essence of the genre down the purest expression, without all the extraneous fluff.
I do have Silksong, and I’ve found it extremely difficult, because when you do the bounce jump, you move diagonally. That is a major headache for me when I have to bounce off a series of (flowers? flytraps?) to reach higher ground. Going up to the elevator near the start and jumping to the left, there’s a series of stone columns on chains moving up and down a bit. Going left from there, I’m finding the enemies very very brutal and difficult to adjust to (and I got 108% on the first game). I’m not too far into the game and I’ll keep at it, but Silksong is brutally hard for me so far. Mob/boss difficulty feels like the end of the first game but with starting gear.
So, this has been a difficult search. If you asked me for an x-com like turn based combat/base building strategy, I could give you 10. Vehicle (Car, truck, motorcycle) racing with weapons? I gotcha covered. Metroidvanias? I can give you a list of 15 or 20 of them without looking anything up. But even in this age of clones and copycats, I can’t find anything that hits all the buttons that Terraria does. (Yells at game devs) Get off my lawn!
I mean, Terraria only has the highest number of positive reviews on Steam of all the three trillion games on there. Kind of setting the bar pretty high.
Strong
No
Limited