itch.io

Personally I'd 100% consider Rimworld to be survival, it's just that you're not playing as a single entity but rather as the colony as a whole, you still need food, water, temperature, even social interaction and comfort, as well as health, and health for all of your individual body parts and organs, honestly to me it's far more survival-y than most survival games.

Monster Hunter definitely isn't survival, I was just comparing it to what I envisioned what you envisioned may look like, personally I love games where you can build up a sort of home base which aids in all of your adventures, from full on progression, such as new gears, skills, quests or more available to you that simply wouldn't be otherwise, to convenience increases (without making the base unpleasantly inconvenient), for example in raft or even factorio, the ability to slowly automate tasks that once required your full time attention and effort is some of the most satisfying feelings offered by any sandbox game.

An example of that sort of expansion based progress that I personally love is FTB Infinity Evolved skyblock, a minecraft modpack where you start on a TINY, virtually useless dirt island, typically 3x3, 2x2 or 1x1 with a single tree, perhaps a hammer, and from that you begin the process of expansion, cutting trees, planting trees, composting leaves into dirt, expanding your tree farm, creating a crook, collecting silk worms from trees, using silk and wood to make a sieve, sieving dirt to get things like stone, seeds and other resources you use for expansion, the entire game is basically a tech tree that opens up until you've got automated tree/coal/lava/water/obsidian/everything farms, obviously that same scale would be nigh-impossible for a small team to meet, but that feeling is something I think is worth trying to replicate, that feeling of "wow, I can't believe how far I've come"

Honestly, a lot of that was probably of very little use, but I hope you managed to gleam SOMETHING of worth from it. :)


I'd definitely agree on the other examples you gave though, they're definitely games where you are expected to survive, not thrive, which TYPICALLY makes your advances feel insignificant, in contrast, rimworld has an ending, where you leave the planet via starship, effectively making the game a massive roguelike, where you start again if you lose and you have a specfic goal in mind you very well may not reach, factorio is similar in that boat, although I guess Rimworld has saves and Factorio has respawns, so not quite roguelike-y.