Hey everyone! We’ve been working on Smalland 2: Lost Realms, and today we’re proud to share our first true gameplay trailer. We’re also announcing that the game is coming in 2027, as we want to take the time to listen to the community feedback and polish some aspects of the game.

Play solo or with up to 10 friends in co-op: tame creatures, build outposts, craft gear and explore new lands, with new perks, crafting and resource gathering systems, plus swimming, climbing and stealth.

We’d love to hear what you think! Some elements are still work in progress.

Feel free to wishlist the game on Steam if you want to support the project. See you in the wild, smalfolks!

Hi everyone!

I've shared The Citadel Must Hold here before, but this time I wanted to show more of the city-building side.

In this clip, my town is consuming more food and stone than it produces. A nearby area has mountains for quarries, grassland for farms, and a valuable iron deposit. The terrain makes it a promising expansion: I can secure the whole area by defending just two chokepoints.

After building walls and towers at the entrances, I add quarries, farms and an iron mine. Food and stone are back in surplus, and iron production has increased too.

That trade-off is a big part of the game: finding resources and room to grow without stretching your defenses too far. Expanding can also bring your buildings within range of hostile Places of Power, which send raids against nearby holdings between the big Monster Tides. More production helps you survive, but claiming that territory means committing to protecting it.

It's a pausable fantasy survival RTS, and I just released 0.5, with a big visual update alongside new Hero abilities, cavalry and towers. This time, though, the spotlight is on the city that supports them 🙂

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4891190/The_Citadel_Must_Hold/

I'm working on Forgebound, a medieval survival and base-building game, and I'm stuck on how to handle the big late threat: a giant that eventually comes for your camp.

Option A: you get a warning a few in-game days ahead (scouts, tracks, tremors), so those days turn into a prep phase. Walls, traps, stockpiling, deciding who fights.

Option B: no warning. It just shows up, and the test is whether your base was built well in general.

A feels fair and gives the prep loop a purpose, but it can turn into a checklist. B feels scarier, but it punishes players who were mid-expansion and had no way to know.

In the base builders you've played, which version made you care more about your layout? Has anyone seen a middle ground that worked, like vague signs that get clearer over time?

(Disclosure: I'm on the small team making it. Steam page if you're curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3691400/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=external&utm_campaign=oct26-forgebound&utm_content=ext-basebuilding-1028)

Yes another "what are the best" post. I did use the search function first I swear.

I'm a casual Xbox Series X gamer and enjoy creating cities and settlements, in particular in sandbox or custom modes. Unfortunately most of the games that get recommended for posts like this aren't available on Xbox.

Games I have enjoyed that roughly fit the base builder theme or have elements of it:

- Frostpunk 1 and 2

- Ixion. Not my favourite but I enjoyed it enough.

- Surviving The Apocalypse. Loved the dark post-apocalyptic feel.

- Railway Empire 2. Because trains are fun.

- Medieval Dynasty. A bit grindy when building villages but still fun and immersive.

- The Alters. Loved everything about this game.

- Surviving Mars. Beautiful game, maybe a little limited in sandbox mode.

- Anno 1800

- A few Civ titles

- Against The Storm

- A few Tropico titles

- Jurassic World Evolution 2

- Fallout 4 with bulk mods and settlement limits removed is hours of fun

Hi r/BaseBuildingGames!

We're the Petit Planet community team, and we've got a question the veteran builders here know better than anyone.

Petit Planet is all about making a little planet your own: shaping the land and skies and decorating your home. Which got us wondering: in any base-building game you've played, what turns a base into a home for you?

Maybe it's the moment you light that first warm lamp in a corner, lay a stone path out to the workshop, or dig a little vegetable patch by the door. One line is plenty, and if you have a screenshot of the spot in your base that feels most like home, we'd love to see it. Longer stories about how it got that way are more than welcome too.

As a thank-you, we'll draw 3 in-game item codes from everyone who answers. The thread stays open for a week, then we'll post the winners here in the comments and send them a message. Winners will get the redemption details in that message.

Can't wait to see your homes, and thanks so much for sharing!

I'm developing PIAST, a medieval settlement-building RTS in UE5, where roads help workers move faster and carts transport larger loads of resources.

I want settlement layout to matter economically, so choosing where to build roads and production buildings becomes part of the strategy.

What do you prefer in base-building games: roads that are mainly aesthetic, or logistics systems that reward careful planning?

I'm a solo developer, and if this sounds like your kind of game, you can check out PIAST on Steam. Adding it to your wishlist would really help me with development!

🎮 Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4830280/Piast/

The full announcement and trailer can be found here: https://www.conanexiles.com/blog/conan-exiles-enhanced-is-coming-to-playstation5-and-xbox-series-xs-as-free-upgrade/

I know that the small but loyal fanbase the game still has on consoles were left disappointed that the enhanced edition was (seemingly) only coming to PC, so good news!

Cross-play is also still in the works, coming "soon" after the enhanced edition patch for both Conan Exiles and Dune: Awakening.

The Maker Way Trailer

To join the playtest, click "Request Access" on the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1532270/The_Maker_Way/

The Maker Way is a first-person sandbox where you design machines, 3D print them, and raid government bases to steal data while robots chase you. Think Scrap Mechanic x Trailmakers x TerraTech, but with raids, base building and a reason to build machines.

Early Access launches Nov 11th. Before that, I'm opening a playtest of the EA build, which is a big step up from the public demo:

• **Full map:** dozens of points of interest, new topography and a new road system
• **New machine parts:** small wheel, steering hinge, data hacking tool, helium ascender, core extractor crane, drone propeller and more
• **New enemies:** a Parallel Collector that races you for resources, plus DTHP turrets at road checkpoints
• **Reworked driving physics:** each wheel has its own offroad traction, so roads and sand now feel really different
• **New ways to collect data:** hack terminals in enemy data centers, or use a crane to extract data cores and haul them to your base
• **Server cooling:** advanced servers overheat unless you build a cooling system in your base

DM me or join our channel on Discord for Bugs, ideas and feedback:

https://discord.com/invite/Vbe55hVYTw

I'll be in the comments all day. Happy to answer anything about the game or my dev journey.

Fields of Aaru is a farming life sim set in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife. There are two of us developing it full-time, and we've been working on it for 3.5 years. The demo has been available since June, and we've just wrapped up Next Fest.

Demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4665870/Fields_of_Aaru_Demo/

The people who play it are kind and supportive (100% positive on Steam from 28 reviews), but most of the praise focuses on the visuals. We feel the gameplay isn't drawing people in, and we've struggled to gain traction on social media.

TL;DR: The game isn't appealing to people the way we hoped it would.

Right now, the game is essentially a standard farming sim with an Egyptian setting and some exploration elements, such as light desert survival mechanics and tombs. We think this might be part of the problem: the gameplay lacks a unique selling point, and it's hard to explain what makes the game special in a single sentence.

We're considering expanding the irrigation system and making the interactions between dry and fertile soil more dynamic.

The land around the village would start out dry. From day one, you'd be able to dig channels from the Nile, watch the water flow through them, and see the surrounding land turn green, creating new farmland for you to cultivate.

Two questions:

• Does this sound more interesting than what's currently described on the Steam page? (If you've read it!)
• If you've seen the trailer or store page, what feels boring or confusing about them? Can you tell what kind of game it is?

For anyone who's played the demo before and wants to give the latest update a try, we've added irrigation channels, villager gifts, more character creation options, an enhanced graphics mode, and six new languages.

I'm the dev of Island Escape. Last time here I posted the base going through four eras. This one is only the first few nights, which is what the free demo on Nov 4 covers.

A campfire is 5 wood and 3 stone. At night a wolf pack comes out, and they won't step into a 9 m circle around a burning fire. You get a warning at dusk, about a minute and a half before.

Every morning there's a 30% chance it rains all day. Rain puts an open fire out in a few seconds, and the circle goes with it. A Thatch Shelter (8 wood, 12 fiber) built right next to the fire, within about 3 m, keeps it burning. It's also the only way to cook on a rainy day, because recipes that need a fire won't use a wet one.

A soaked fire doesn't come straight back. Under a shelter it takes about 20 seconds to dry out and catch again, so putting the roof up after the rain starts leaves you a gap in the dark. You can carry a torch, but each one burns for 90 seconds, twice as fast in rain.

So the order the demo pushes you toward is fire, shelter over the fire, then the workbench (the bed is made at the workbench).

Would you build the roof first, knowing it only matters about one day in three? Or gamble on the weather and get the workbench going?

Free demo Nov 4 (stone age and the raft), full game March 2027: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5235390/

Playable Link: https://worldsalpha.com/play

Learn More on our Website: https://worldsalpha.com

Hey all!

I'm excited to introduce WORLDS - it's an MMO-lite game that runs in the browser and takes some of my favorite elements from Minecraft, Runescape and PoE and merges it into a casual adventure/rpg with heavy progression elements. I wanted a blocky game that scratched my itch for multiplayer, progression, and a non-boring grind element for mid/late game.

The gameplay of worlds is built around an idea I had of something called "Expeditions". Each gameplay session you set out on a new "expedition" to a 1024x1024 world that is randomly generated climate, features, biome, enemy encounters, bosses, and more. You loot and extract ores, material, whatever you're looking for or just explore. When you're done there's a "caravan" npc at the start of each expedition area, talk to him and he'll take you back to your camp. Your camp is your base/home, where you take your loot and gear you found out on each expedition to upgrade your home, upgrade your gear, improve your skills, and more - then set out on your next expedition. You can even encounter trapped travelers and people out on expeditions and invite them back to your camp for perks and other things over time.

There's boss elements as well, random encounters, a huge variety of unique things to discover, wildlife, and more.

The games skill system borrows heavy from Runescape, there's no single "level" system, instead each skill is improved by doing what's related to it. Mining increases mining skill, fishing is fishing, smelting ore is smelting etc - skill progression unlocks higher tier and better gear/perks for those relevant skill trees as you increase them over time.

You can also co-op with friends or hop in right away with strangers. Each time you set out for an expedition you can set your play mode to "open" which lets anyone join in when they go out on an expedition and adventure with you, or you can join up with anyone else on an expedition that is an open play mode. You can invite friends to co-op with you with simple invite codes and adventure/explore with parties up to 8 players.

Your skills, gear and progression are persistent and stick with your character. So if you go play with others, or friends, solo and with a group, you're working and improving the same character, your loot comes home with you, and your skills grow over time, etc.

The games still in alpha, so there's a lot of things to come - the main questline isn't done yet, but the game is quite enjoyable - a lot of our testers have plowed 50+ hours each into it the first week we gave it to them just because they enjoyed it, they weren't paid and had no incentives so that's a good sign we think!

It would mean so much to hear your feedback and what you think. You can play and create an account without an email or giving any info (just sign up using plain username + password when you play). If you want to keep your account for later you can add an email later to recover it, up to you!

Thanks everyone! Really looking forward to what you think, and again - this is in alpha! <3

P.S. This has been built by myself, and a really small team of modelers/contractors that have worked on the assets over the last 1+ years, art style and visuals are all credit to them!

You can play free here, no email or anything required - just make a username/password (no mobile support yet): https://worldsalpha.com

Hi everyone, ill make it quick. Im a huge history nerd, and have been playing games like Rise of Nations, Stronghold, AOE and Civilization and Empire Earth most of my life. Seeing how the gaming industry isnt really willing to make games like that anymore, I figured I would. This isn't a sales pitch, because its free, and still SUPER early in development, but I would like people to try it out, and give me feedback. The game is called Stone and Iron: Keep and Hold. It is a kingdom/ empire building game, with flavors of the above aforementioned games. Each faction is heavily researched, and true to how they would look during the period. Build towns, expand your territory. Capture neutral cities. Train troops. Utilize forests and terrain for stealth and set up ambushes. Diplomacy. Mood modifiers for rival kingdoms. They react to your troop movements or territory gains. And alot more to come. Keep in mind, it is no where near being done, and has really only started. I would love any and all input though. Thos is a passion project of mine, and I work on it when I can, between work and normal, everyday life. Thank you so much for reading! Its on Itch.io. https://therarebear.itch.io/stone-and-iron

Hi everyone!

I'm a solo dev working on AI Race Tycoon, a simulation/management game centered around scaling up your tech infrastructure across different eras.

You begin in an old garage buying cheap workstations and managing basic power/cooling. As your AI lab scales, you relocate and expand into:

1. A multi-room tech office with research clusters and employee desks.

2. A high-rise corporate tower managing enterprise server racks.

3. Orbital and space compute setups to feed your frontier models.

You can test the progression loop directly in your browser on itch io

https://timothystudios.itch.io/ai-race-tycoon

I'd appreciate any feedback on how the sense of space progression and facility upgrades feel!

Hi all — full disclosure, I'm Jay, the solo dev behind this.

Utopia: The Creation of a Nation (SNES, 1991) is one of my favorite games ever, and I couldn't find anything like it on phones. So I spent $1,000+ and many weeks making one: I decompiled the original and studied how it worked so this remake would stay true to form, not just borrow the name.

Arcadia: Space Colony Sim is that remake, and it's now live on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Dieselweasel.Arcadia

You found a colony on an alien world and try to keep your settlers alive and happy. Lay down life support, power and industry, keep the air and water clean, and balance the knock-on effects — crime, employment, happiness, the whole ecosystem moves when you change one part of it.

I'm here to engage, not just drop a link — I'd genuinely love feedback from base-building folks. What does the original Utopia do that modern colony sims still get wrong? And if you try Arcadia, what felt faithful and what didn't? I'll be in the comments answering questions.

I'm the solo developer of Zero Point, a sci-fi survival game with base building planned as part of the progression. My previous post here was an early look at the environment; this time I'm showing the base-management prototype.

The footage follows collecting water, returning to a resource depot and using the base's power and oxygen-coverage screen. Later in the clip, I check survival stats, charge a weapon and use a rest spot. I'm trying to give returning to the base a useful rhythm between expeditions.

Gameplay video: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1xfy9sj/making_my_scifi_base_useful_between_trips/

The buildings are still a pre-placed test environment. Crafting and player-placed construction are still in development. This update focuses on the resource and life-support systems around that future building loop. Steam Early Access is currently planned for December 2026.

For people who enjoy managing a base, what would make these return trips satisfying: preparing power for equipment, expanding breathable coverage, or a different kind of upkeep?

I'll put the Steam page in the comments if you'd like to follow development.

i'm on a small team making a single-player city tycoon (BlockRise). you start with one shop in a real city and fight AI rivals for the street, plot by plot. a question about one rule, for people who play this kind of game.

how it works right now: the best plots in the city go up for auction. when one opens, a card pops up to announce it, the game keeps running, and you only see the bidding if you click "bid". the rivals bid on their own whether you show up or not. so if you're busy sorting out a fire on the other side of town, a rival can walk away with the corner you were saving up for. beating a rival at an auction also makes them remember you, which matters later.

we're not asking about pausing. Offworld Trading Company paused for its auctions and a lot of players said it broke the pace, and we like the city moving. what we're unsure about is the feeling: losing a bidding war is fair, missing it because you looked away can feel like the game cheated.

so, as players, which of these would you actually want?

• leave a max bid in advance on a plot you care about, and the game bids for you up to that

• the auction stays open a bit longer once you've shown interest in that plot

• nothing extra: a clear warning is enough, missing one is part of running a city

and has a game ever let you set a max bid and walk away? which one, and did it feel good or just automatic?

(if you want to try it when it's ready, the playtest waitlist is explained on our site: https://blockrisegame.com)

I made a 4X strategy, civilization building game that can be played many different ways. Whether you want to run the world economy, become supreme leader, or reach the end of the tech tree, there are many routes to victory. Don't like winners? You can start a nuclear apocalypse and clear the board of everyone, including yourself. Oh, and did I mention it's multiplayer?

https://imgur.com/a/PIzK6Ao

You can find it at https://stitchthefox.itch.io/chronicles

There is also a brand new discord community here: https://discord.gg/SYHgrz6ncF

heads up, this isn't a classic base builder where you place every wall. it's closer to a colony sim on autopilot. a few stone age tribes start out on a big map and they decide for themselves where to settle, what to build and who to fight. huts turn into villages and cities over time, roads and trade show up, and each tribe ends up with its own language and customs.

you can pause, inspect anyone, and mess with the world a bit, but mostly you watch your settlements grow (or collapse).

question for people here: does a colony sim where you don't control the colonists still scratch the itch for you, or do you need direct control?

free, runs in the browser: https://thehumanbox.com
desktop builds for win/mac/linux and source: https://github.com/1homsi/thehumanbox

Hey! I'm the developer of Resonurgy, a base-building and automation game now in Early Access on Steam.

You start next to the Nexus, the heart of your base, with a backpack and a few kits. From there you lay out drills, smelters and assemblers, connect them with belts, research new machines, and slowly turn a clearing into a sprawling alchemical workshop, chapter by chapter.

The recent 0.2.0 update added Storms: waves of dissonant creatures that test how well your base is laid out. Turrets need ammo from your own production lines, so a messy factory is a vulnerable one. If you'd rather just build, peaceful worlds keep storms off entirely.

There's a free demo covering the first chapters:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5011960/Resonurgy/

I'm reading every comment, so I'd love to hear what you think of the base layout side of things.

Hi all, solo dev of Rhodian Exodus here, after reworking on graphics & UI of my game, I've re-enabled an updated demo and updated the steam page. The game has a few unique mechanics but I will let the steam page and youtube channel of the game speak for it:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4953480/Rhodian_Exodus/?utm_source=reddit

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RhodianExodus/shorts

Hey! My game is releasing soon and I wanted to share a recent clip that I made after redoing all of my game's art (moving all drawn art away from AI!).

In this clip, I'm talking to various NPCs using the game's language model. It ships with Gemma 4 E2B, which uses <2GB RAM and creates near-instant responses (on certain hardware). Note you can also run your own model or point to a remote one, but the bundled model works on most hardware.

I started this project because I've played a lot of the popular AI-driven games and mods - like Mantella for Fallout, CHIM for Skyrim. They were super interesting and novel, but ultimately the game didn't actually care what interactions you had.

After I spent some time developing a RimWorld mod that did something similar, I realized I could just make my own game - so I did! I'm building a living world where NPC interactions have permanent consequences, for better or worse. NPCs aren't just given a prompt saying "You are a mage in x city, act narcissistic". If you're interested, this is an example of the inner workings. NPCs draw from real knowledge, and any concrete answer they give is forced through a dictionary that pulls directly from the game - so if you mod the game and change a recipe, the world's blacksmiths will know the right one.

Anyways, the game releases soon, so if you're interested feel free to wishlist! I'd also love feedback or questions you might have on the system, or the game as a whole. Thanks!

~ Vivienne

Iron Command is a classic base-building RTS in the spirit of C&C and Dune 2. You set up a command centre, power and factories, send harvesters out to the riftstone fields, research upgrades and push out against a second faction. It plays on a normal monitor, VR is optional.

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on building destruction and wanted to share where it's at. Here's a video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5RCg5W6Z1Q

Right now every building is made of pieces. Shells tear holes where they hit, the roof comes down once the walls holding it are gone, and soldiers inside try to get out before it all collapses.

The part I haven't cracked yet is the rubble. I'd like tanks to be able to drive over it, but so far it looks like toys bouncing over gravel. So for now they just drive around the pile until I find a better way.

Any ideas how to solve that? Or would you say it doesn't really matter, and driving around the rubble is fine?

Steam page if you want to follow along: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5089330/Iron_Command/