Best Base Building Games 2023

Want to discover the best base building games on Steam? Well, you’ve come to the right place!

Whether you’re a fan of survival, strategy, or sandboxes, the best base building PC games have something to offer to every kind of gamer.

With that said, sorting out the good from the bad ones can be a lot of work, especially on platforms as massive as Steam.

To make things easier, here we’re highlighting the best base building games on Steam in 2023.

This includes new multiplayer base building games as well as open world base building games that drop you into immersive settings.

So, without much further ado, let’s dive right in!

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If building and guiding a spacecraft full of colonists across the cosmos sounds like a fun time, you should check out Stardeus.

Set aboard a broken starship, this mechanically-robust colony sim has you designing your own layouts complete with manned drones and hibernating survivors.

As you travel through the deep stretches of space, your ship, drones, and colonists will need to be maintained as well as upgraded to unlock their true potential.

Doing so improves the odds of you surviving any and every challenge the galaxy has to throw at you.

Cosmoteer is another base building game set in space that has you designing the starship of your dreams.

This is made possible thanks to the game’s intuitive ship creation tools that allow you to fully customize its shape, floor plan, and modules.

Since your ship’s design is key to surviving, you’ll have to be careful about where you place weapons, engines, hallways, and crew quarters.

Designs can be shared with other players using Steam Workshop, and you can join up with other players in online PvP and co-op.

Putting its own unique spin on the genre, The Wandering Village is currently one of the best base building games on Steam.

In it, players are given the challenge of growing a settlement that rests snugly on the back of a giant, wandering creature.

This leads to a somewhat symbiotic relationship wherein the player’s actions will affect the creature and vice versa.

Only by working together will you, your villagers, and the creature be able to navigate a beautiful post-apocalyptic world contaminated by poisonous plants.

Building off of games like Theme Hospital and the more recent Two Point Hospital, Two Point Campus is a lighthearted tycoon business sim.

Players are tasked with building and running their own campus university complete with staff, classrooms, students, and curriculums.

While business sims are known for their complex systems, Two Point Campus keeps things light, allowing you to bask in all its zany humor.

To this point, the game features cartoony graphics and enough bizarre predicaments to make even the most stone-faced players chuckle.

Our next suggestion for open world base building is The Planet Crafter, a space terraforming and crafting game currently in Steam Early Access.

The basic premise of this game is that you are an astronaut sent to a hostile planet in hopes of making it habitable for human life in the future.

To be successful, you’ll have to learn how to survive on the planet by first building a base and generating enough oxygen, heat, and pressure to create a biosphere.

This requires you to go out and harvest various materials to keep things running smoothly and slowly expand your operation.

Noble Fates is a 3D fantasy-themed kingdom sim with unique AI-driven characters that can be controlled directly by the player.

In it, you set out to build, craft, farm, mine, hunt, and defend a growing colony of villagers as they live their lives and make new discoveries.

The game gives you the option to oversee your empire from the sky or take control of individual characters from a third-person POV.

The ability to shape each character’s story in real time is a nice touch that’s further complemented by a robust set of building tools that are fun to explore.

Next up is Len’s Island, an open world survival game that sees you carving out a new life for yourself on a beautiful island teeming with wonder.

Explore the island’s mysteries by dungeon crawling through caves, hiking through forests, and constructing homes and farms.

The game uses a streamlined, modular building system that will make even the most novice designers feel like seasoned builders.

When you’re not taking care of crops or expanding your small home, you’ll embark on a journey to encounter various characters and engage in fights with adversaries you encounter.

Moving along, The Riftbreaker is a base building mech game released in 2022 by EXOR Studios in which you take on the role of a scientist/commando named Ashley.

Ashley is joined by her mech Mr. Riggs as the pair try to establish a settlement on an alien planet whose natural inhabitants aren’t too keen on visitors.

Alien creatures will frequently invade settlements, forcing Mr. Riggs to step into action and blast them away using his machine gun, rocket launcher, sword, and more.

Gameplay primarily focuses on gathering resources to construct turrets and other defenses for your network of bases across the planet’s surface.

Sharks are typically the kind of creatures we try to avoid at all costs, especially if you find yourself dropped in the middle of the ocean with just a few planks of wood.

In Raft, this nightmarish premise becomes a reality as you and your friends scramble to build a mobile fort using floating debris from the game’s shark-infested waters.

Armed with a retractable hook and a couple of blueprints to get you started, you’ll eventually create a sturdy ship that can withstand attacks and keep your crew alive.

Crafting new gear and stations allows you to reach new parts of the world and sleuth out the root of your sea-faring predicament.

What better setting for building a cozy log cabin than a procedurally-generated purgatory for Vikings, complete with menacing trolls and sea monsters?

Valheim casts you as one of Odin’s fallen warriors whose soul ends up in the tenth Norse world, a sprawling primordial pool with untapped resources and unmeasured threats.

To survive, you’ll need to keep your Viking fed, well-rested, and safe from enemy raids by constructing tools, weapons, and fortified camps across each region.

We chose to highlight this game mainly for its refined building system which streamlines the process while still allowing for detailed adjustments.

It’s been a bumpy ride for No Man’s Sky but the game is in a much better place nowadays than it was at launch.

Hello Games has spent years adding requested features ranging from base building to online multiplayer and mod support, resulting in a resurgence of popularity.

It also helps that the game’s engine has been redesigned and upgraded over the years, ensuring it runs buttery smooth on just about any machine.

If you were a fan of the original concept but felt short-changed, you may want to give NMS another shot, even if to witness firsthand how it approaches base building.

Similar to No Man’s Sky, Astroneer offers a vibrant space sandbox to explore as you set out to colonize an alien planet.

The game features a unique crafting system that tasks you with connecting various stations and power plants with tethers that also grant your character oxygen.

What sets Astroneer apart from other base building games is its Terrain Tool, which allows the wielder to bend the environment to their will.

This has many applications that can benefit traversal, production, and creativity.

Minecraft is a must-play for anyone who enjoys open-world survival games or simply building to their heart’s content.

Whether you want to build a massive castle or a makeshift rollercoaster for all your friends to ride, you can find a recipe for just about anything.

And when you run out of ideas in the vanilla game, you can always start experimenting with the best Minecraft mods.

These allow you to visit new worlds, customize blocks, and craft all sorts of cool items like a jetpack for marveling at your architectural masterpieces from above.

What’s that you say? You actually like the idea of someone potentially destroying the base you spent countless hours building?

Although many of us would much rather play it safe, Rust is a game all about taking risks and learning to adapt to the hellish rules of an ungoverned society.

Starting out is an uphill battle that will probably take several attempts before you can manage to scout out a good location, set up camp, and build defenses without another player showing up to smite you.

However, once you get past the initial hurdles, you’ll be surprised by what you can build in this game using its robust crafting system.

Swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction, Satisfactory is a relaxing base building game that emphasizes automated resource management.

Things start off small until you’re eventually drowning in conveyor belts and assembly lines to the point you’ll forget you can make stuff with all your accumulated resources.

There are many ways to put your materials to good use, from weapons and tools to buildings and vehicles that unlock new areas to reveal more creatures, resource types, and opportunities to explore.

Currently in Early Access on Steam, the game is well-supported by developer Coffee Stain Studios, who issues rolling updates based on player feedback.

Factorio is another base building game centered on automating machines to gather and refine resources for your very own production paradise.

At first, you’ll have to manually chop trees, mine ores, and craft parts until you’ve conducted enough research to unlock automation.

Continue expanding and you’ll discover new obstacles such as local wildlife that isn’t too keen on you stripping away their homes.

Factorio’s progression system offers an assortment of upgrades to boost efficiency, harness alternative power sources, and program AI for your machines.

Base building fans will be happy to know that RimWorld features a near-perfect blend of building, survival, and strategic gameplay with plenty of room for customization.

In it, you pick from several biomes before crash-landing with a team of colonists on a randomly generated alien planet.

Since colonists have physical and emotional needs that must be met for communities to flourish, you’ll have to provide housing and expand when necessary.

Its deeply-rewarding gameplay loop is further complemented by an AI-driven storyteller known for its hilariously morbid and ridiculous gameplay scenarios.

Oxygen Not Included is a challenging space survival sim that sees you commanding a space crew living beneath an alien planet’s surface.

Gameplay has you assigning crew members to stations, gathering resources to keep them alive, and researching new technologies to improve your base.

With oxygen extremely scarce, the stakes are considerably high, and one lousy call can easily result in a large portion of your colony getting wiped from existence for good.

Temperatures can also rapidly rise or fall, pollution will start to build up quickly, and the mental states of your colonists are constantly in flux.

Carrying on, Grounded offers a challenging survival sandbox experience set within a suburban backyard’s confines.

The only catch is, you’ve been shrunk down to the size of an ant, and pretty much everything wants to kill you.

One of your primary objectives in the game is to construct a base to rest your head at night, though finding safety in Grounded’s world isn’t that easy.

The game provides many options for building structures out of different materials, and you can set up shop just about anywhere.

Last but not least, Subnautica sees your spaceship crash-landing on an alien planet covered almost entirely in water.

While searching for oxygen and food to keep you alive, you’ll encounter raw materials and sea creatures used to upgrade tools, expand your base, and craft submersibles.

Searching through crash sites reveals more about the strange planet and nets you valuable upgrades.

The game is pretty open-ended, allowing you to set your own goals, whether it be exploring the ocean or building the biggest base possible.