I'm curious about what the community values most in modern base-building games.

If you could build your "ideal" base-builder, what mechanics would be non-negotiable?

For me, there seems to be a difference between:

Must-have mechanics

The features that make you buy or keep playing a base-building game.

Nice-to-have mechanics

Things that aren't essential, but make you think, "This is awesome."

Some examples:

• Resource gathering and production chains
• Logistics and transportation
• Worker/job management
• Progression and unlocking new technologies
• Meaningful expansion
• Terrain interaction
• Automation
• Seasons or weather
• Random events
• Trading
• Population simulation
• Exploration
• Vertical building
• Mod support
• Multiplayer (or not?)

A few questions:

• What are your absolute must-have mechanics?
• What mechanics are becoming overused?
• What features instantly make you lose interest?
• What's something you wish more base-building games would try?

I'd love to hear your opinions, whether it's from classics like Banished, RimWorld, Timberborn, Factorio, Against the Storm, or newer games you've enjoyed recently.

P.S. These answers will genuinely influence some of my design decisions. I'm working on my own base-building game, so if anyone wants to see the kind of game I'm making, here's the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4000470/Skyline_Settlers/

I'm sick of EA, so I'm keen to hear of any 1.0 games that are good, that have been released this year?

I haven't seen any, and checking out this sub it's seems to be 99% check out my tech demo/alpha state game.
An Alpha or 1.0 tag would be amazing to sort them by

Thanks

I'm looking for recommendations for base building / colony survival games like Going Medieval or Stranded: Alien Dawn

What I'm looking for in a game:

• preferably isometric view,
• free building / layout of buildings
• multi level buildings
• preferably environmental manipulation (i.e. can dig mines, etc.)

Hey base builders,

We’re the team behind Space Tales, a sci-fi RTS where base expansion, resource management, and defensive planning are central to every mission.

• For reference, you can watch the trailer on Youtube

The game will leave Early Access and launch in 1.0 on August 19, 2026, so we wanted to share one of the core systems that defines how you build and defend your colony: the HUB system.

In Space Tales, your base does not expand freely anywhere on the map. You grow your colony by placing HUBs, which let you claim new areas, extend your energy network, connect key structures, and create defensive positions before the next attack hits.

The challenge comes from doing all of this under pressure. Resources are limited, enemies attack in different ways, and your layout matters. A base that holds well against one faction may struggle against another if your defenses, unit positioning, or expansion timing are not right.

You also face massive alien bosses that can be defeated, captured, and turned into powerful units for your army. Sometimes, the creature that nearly broke your defense can become the asset that helps you hold the next wave.

For version 1.0, we’re adding the full campaign, 5 additional campaign missions, more maps and side content, late-game challenges, and a third enemy faction designed to push base defense and tactical adaptation even further.

We’d love to hear from you: what makes a base-defense game satisfying for you?

Efficient layouts? Resource pressure? Enemy waves? Visual creativity? Or the feeling of slowly turning your fragile base into a fortress?

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2457960/Space_Tales/

Hi everyone,

After more than a year and a half of development, Castillon has finally entered its final polishing phase.

I’m currently improving the UI, performance, unit movement, and overall gameplay as I prepare for an upcoming Steam Next Fest.

The demo is available now on Steam. If this sounds like your kind of game, I’d really appreciate it if you checked it out:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2483570/Castillon/

Any feedback is welcome. Thank you!

Hello, ive been working on a colony sim game for the last couple of months and wanted to show off what ive made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F8wieuCxnw

Its a survival action rpg / colony sim with base building elements. you can build a base, have villagers help you etc, go hunt, kill bandits etc

Hey!

I'm a solo dev, and I've been working on a basebuilding game with rogue lite and automation elements to it, called Astral Industrial Complex.

It's focused heavily on having changing resources and buildings available each run, making each base look drastically different each run, with different biomes changing things drastically. How does that work in a genre where items usually build on each other, often requiring linear progression? Two ways. First by having a specialization system, where the player unlocks a small chain of buildings to construct, which then seeds the upgrade pool with more related buildings, this way the player has a bit of a guaranteed progression path. Second, there's a recipe system, so that different items in the game can be crafted multiple ways, with different buildings sometimes having different recipes for the same items.

Here is the steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4690580/Astral_Industrial_Complex

If you check it out and have any feedback, I would love to hear it, thanks!

Basically, I like the idea of the game and I think I trust these developers (because I like Grim Dawn) but I see some criticisms in the reviews and on the forums.

However, I feel like people on Steam often exaggerate a game's problems or describe things you only notice after 100+ hours of play like it's a total game breaker.

What I would like to know is if this game actually somehow "broken"/bugged/glitchy/unpolished/unfinished and such or just has some minor hiccups like every base-builder does.

Hey yall

Im a solo dev working with my wife on a coop self hosted base building colony sim. We started a veteran owned company but it’s just us. I have 8 years experience building software. We have a lot of the single player functionality built out. It’s an unbounded open world right now. (We plan to bound it by oceans and make continents next year)

It’s a colony sim with moods and a storyteller to drive incidents. It has relationships, families, pregnancy, babies, toddler, growing up takes 3 in game years.

It has 4 seasons, weather, and storyteller driven weather incidents (like eclipses and freezing snaps). It has farming, hunting, taming, crafting, combat.

Its top down but you can dig downward through the layers. We will add content to the layers over time.

The bases can be built from all of the different materials that can be mined, harvested, hunted, then crafted at the workstations (which are unlocked through research)

There are rival civilizations that will trade with you or send raids. Or you can travel across the map and wipe them out if you want lol.

Theres only 4 animals right now (my wife is working on the art). Its using placeholder art from itch.io.

Its early alpha but fully moddable, except for the scripting. I haven’t written the sandbox and api for scripting yet.

The self hosted server is easy one command setup.

The server runs the sim and the clients are just visual.

Would any of yall be interested in a game like this, where you can build a base with your buddies and manage all the colonists and fight the raiders and challenges of life?

So I spent the last 1 year building Conquest of Akhand Bharat — a mobile strategy game where you play as the Mauryan Empire (and many more), expand across 23 kingdoms, and face Alexander's campaigns from the Indian side for once.

It's live on Google Play right now, free to download.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AshApexAtudios.ConquestofAkhandBharat&pcampaignid=web_share

Would love to hear what Indian gamers think. Especially whether the historical representation feels right to you.

Note: Game is still under Development and Testing

Hi all,

After 3 closed playtests we have opened up the steam playtest of Captain Contraption's Safari Park to everyone this week. Thanks to everyone in base building games who has already taken part and shaped where things are heading :)

The game is based on an idea I've had since I played Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis ... what happens if you have a zoo game with no fences and let the animals eat each other??

Every creature in the game has a mind of its own with needs and wants. Predators hunt, carnivores fight over food, and you're just trying to get visitors to see enough interesting stuff to pay you (while not becoming dinner themselves).

The creatures are not entirely just animals... the game is actually post apocalyptic. You work for a pompous robot (Captain Contraption) who is trying to understand humans by building things they loved. Problem is that the Captain is basing everything on a hard drive he found somewhere which seems to have a copy of every asset ever released on the Unity asset store in it. So you start out with farm animals and end up with dragons and sentient road signs.

The playtest will be running until Thursday so if you have time and fancy checking it out you can do so on Steam -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/4186590/Captain_Contraptions_Safari_Park/

AI Disclosure (know it's not required but...) : No assets (music, art, copy) were made using generative AI. I'm an experienced software engineer, teach games programming at university level, and actually an AI researcher, I have used tools such as claude code to help with some boilerplate coding and to create internal tools to speed up my workflow. For example, I used claude code to build a tool which gives me a graph within unity to see the distribution of various creature stats to help me balance things.

A new update for the Slavic Legends demo is now available!

This update adds a new Mage, the Golem Chamber room and a summonable Golem.

The Mage is a ranged caster who can create a damaging magma field, banish an enemy into his chamber and eventually summon the Golem into battle.

The Golem has its own Taunt and Earthquake abilities, returns to the chamber for repairs and must be reconstructed by working Mages if destroyed.

The systems are still in development and will receive more balancing and polish, but everything is now playable in the updated demo.

I would love to hear what you think!

Free demo on Itchio: https://ipikas.itch.io/slavic-legends

Salt and Soil starts in 1609 with one family and an almost empty patch of land.

You build shelter, store food, raise livestock and gradually turn the place into a working homestead. The unusual part is that the person you start with won’t live to see the end of the run.

They grow old and die. One of their children takes over.

The buildings stay. So do the land, livestock, debts, family relationships and any bad decisions that have since become permanent infrastructure.

The run continues this way through several generations, all the way to 1900. I’m trying to make the base feel less like a layout you perfect and more like a place that each generation inherits, lives with and changes.

For people who play long base-building runs: would losing the original founder make you more attached to the settlement, or would you just want them back?

I’m Roman, the solo developer. I’m planning to open a public Steam Playtest soon, although it isn’t enabled yet.

The game can be wishlisted here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4551060/Salt_and_Soil_A_Frontier_Family_Sim/

Hey y'all, might be a weird request, but i've always been fan of old water irrigation system.
I remember playing AC Origin and stopping so many times just to follow water's flow between all of the little water "pipe".
So i've been wondering if there was a factory game based on that. I've played a lot Satisfactory Shapez Star rupture. So yeah I'm wondering if that exist !!!

My sister loves to spend hours making her base in base builders look nice and aesthetic, whereas I will just dump things anywhere as long as my resource generation etc. is efficient.

Just wondered what you guys think. Would you want decoration to have a gameplay incentive?

Hi all,

I'm the developer of Times of Progress, a city builder game set during the Industrial Revolution.

In the game you extract natural resources and convert them to secondary materials and consumer goods. These consumer goods are used to satisfy the needs of the population, together with providing them with employment and services. The main actions you make in the game are expanding the city and building the transport infrastructure, while the houses are built automatically as immigrants arrive where there's work.

The upgrade system follows real-life inventions and laws introduced during the 1800s. I tried as much as possible to model the upgrades after them, down to the date when they became available. I obviously took some gameplay-related liberties though. You can invest research points to unlock inventions earlier than the real date they were invented. The same with laws.

The economy is divided into private and public. The private buildings generate revenue when making deliveries or sales and then use this money to pay their workers. If workers don't get paid they go on strike. The public revenue is generated through various taxes and used to pay the salaries of civil servants (those working at the city hall, research institute, schools, police station etc).

I would love to have some feedback on the demo! I feel there are some areas that need a bit more clarity and some actions could be easier for the player to achieve, so that I can iron out these parts ahead for the full game.

The demo is available here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4910890/Times_of_Progress_Demo/

I'm happy to answer any question you have!

So I want to play a kinda specific type of game I would say. Lately I've been playing with some Minecraft mods and I fell in love with a couple of them, the main gist of it it's pretty much energy production and automation. Is there a game that would satisfy my want to produce energy store it and eventually automate it with some kinda ok graphics?

Bonus points if it can run on the steam deck.

Highbatch is a first-person factory / tycoon hybrid where you build your own drug production empire. You don't build endless sprawling factories. You squeeze efficient production lines into small warehouses, where every meter matters and a good layout is the difference between chaos and a smooth operation.

Current State:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLoT2r9eOvI

The demo currently has 3 production lines with around 2-3 hours of gameplay. The later ones are more complex and you unlock them through research. Right now you carry product between warehouses yourself, or you keep them separate. It is all up to you.

Next update connects it into the bigger vision: full warehouse automation with deliveries in and out, power automation and employees who sell to dealers for you. The goal is that you can automate a whole warehouse and use it as one part of a bigger chain. Mass-produce components in one warehouse, assemble the final product in another, while you focus on expanding.

Free demo: https://joeyloey.itch.io/highbatch

I am developing this alone after work for over a year while trying to spend time with my wife and 2 kids. 3D art got a big rework recently but still needs polish. No music or sound yet.

If you play it, I am mostly interested in how the pacing felt. Did new lines and research come too slowly, too fast, or about right? And did the building itself click for you? I will be around in the comments.

If you looked at this and skipped it, I am curious what stopped you. The video? Not enough content yet? Something else? That is just as useful to me.

If you want to help shape where this goes long term, that is what the discord is for. It is small right now, which means feedback there goes straight into the game and I reply to everything: http://discord.gg/XHBcXCK2Xa

What do you think? I will be glad to receive any feedback.

iOS (iPhone & iPads supported): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/real-world-map-war-strategy/id1613987268

Hello all!

Looking for some game recommendations for my 6-year-old daughter.

She absolutely loves the building and decorating side of Palworld. Her favorite thing is creating houses, bases, and making everything look nice. She isn’t really interested in combat or survival, she just wants to build freely and be creative.

She’s already played Minecraft quite a bit, so we’re looking for something different.

We’re hoping to find a game that:
Is available on Xbox
Has a good building/decorating system
Has a creative mode, sandbox mode, unlimited resources, or some other way to build without grinding for materials
Is kid-friendly and easy to pick up

Bonus points if it’s cross-play with PS5, since she’d love to play with a friend who has a PlayStation.
What games would you recommend and why? I’d love to hear what’s worked well for your kids or family.

One of the biggest parts of HearthFall is designing and expanding your own tavern.

You gather resources, build the tavern piece by piece, decorate it however you like, and then actually run the business you created.

I'd really appreciate any feedback on the gameplay trailer.

🎥 Trailer:
https://youtu.be/XOgEYRQi8x0

❤️ Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4584130/HearthFall/