What are the best building games on PC? Building games are a great way to indulge architectural creativity, but there are many great building games on PC to choose from. Thankfully, we have the brick-and-mortar necessary to assemble a list of the best building games on PC with the strongest foundations.
From compulsive free PC games to fully fledged triple-A titles, the best PC games incorporating free-range building allow us to stake our claim on another world and bend it to our will. Whether you need a base to defend against oncoming dinosaurs in Ark: Survival Evolved or are scrabbling together rusted scrap in apocalypse games like Fallout 4, there are nearly as many reasons to build as there are building games. Whatever kind of building game you’re after, we’ve got the right blueprints for you here on PCGamesN.
Here are some of the top building games on PC:
- Abiotic Factor
- Dune Awakening
- InZOI
- Runescape Dragonwilds
- Assassins Creed Shadows
- Frostpunk 2
- Tiny Glade
- Planet Coaster 2
- 7 Days to Die
- Palworld
- Cities Skylines 2
- Surviving Mars
- Townscaper
- Teardown
- Valheim
- Planet Zoo
- Satisfactory
- Timberborn
- Raft
- Ark Survival Evolved
- Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
- Fortnite
- No Man’s Sky
- Fallout 4
- Poly Bridge
- The Sims 4
- Trove
- Rust
- Minecraft
- Roblox
Abiotic Factor
Embracing a nostalgic visual style reminiscent of the ’90s, Abiotic Factor casts you as a scientist investigating paranormal phenomena and anomalies. Team up with up to five other players to explore diverse alien worlds, confront extraterrestrial threats, and establish intricate bases across various biomes.
Before embarking on your mission, select a specialized PhD to equip yourself with essential crafting tools. With roles ranging from defense analyst to phytogenetic botanist and archotechnic, assembling a well-rounded crew is crucial for surviving these challenging environments.
Dune Awakening
Dune Awakening unfolds in an alternate timeline where Paul Atreides was never born, sparking an endless war between House Atreides and House Harkonnen. You arrive as a prisoner on Arrakis, tasked with uncovering the mystery of the vanished Fremen. However, your first priority is surviving the planet’s harsh desert conditions. Constructing a robust base is paramount for survival on Arrakis. We highly recommend familiarizing yourself with base-building strategies to get a head start.
Survival must always be your top concern, as you need to stay alive to climb the social hierarchy. With dedication and resources, your humble shack can evolve into a royal residence. But none of this is possible without securing precious water, and efficient methods like utilizing a Blood Purifier are key to maintaining your supply.
Inzoi
InZOI empowers you to craft the dwelling of your dreams, leveraging the power of Unreal Engine 5 to create remarkably realistic homes using its intuitive tools. These tools include generative AI, which allows for the creation of 3D objects from photographs. You can even use your phone’s camera for motion tracking to generate in-game animations.
Beyond its impressive building mechanics, InZOI features a compelling life simulation that offers a fresh take on the genre. While the InZOI release date is still a couple of years away, early glimpses reveal incredible promise. Keep an eye on the InZOI roadmap to discover all the planned features for its early access phase.
Runescape Dragonwilds
At its core, Runescape Dragonwilds is a survival game, but it also boasts deep building mechanics that invite boundless creativity. By mastering Runescape Dragonwilds skills, you gain access to a spell that enables third-person construction, simplifying the placement of objects within your world. With a vast array of construction pieces at your disposal, even novice builders can effortlessly assemble complex structures.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
You might be surprised to find Assassin’s Creed Shadows on a list of building games, but the AC Shadows Hideout system offers remarkable freedom to create a home for yourself and your team of ninja scouts.
Not only can you provide facilities for honing their skills, but there’s ample space to establish an animal sanctuary, populating it with pets discovered in locations like the AC Shadows Cat Island. Gathering AC Shadows resources is essential for building your Hideout, but you’ll naturally acquire these materials as you progress through quests.
Frostpunk 2
Survival games are often unforgiving, and Frostpunk 2 keeps you on your toes as you assume leadership of New London. This fictional early 20th-century settlement is one of humanity’s last strongholds after a global cooling event plunged Earth into a deadly tundra. Now in charge, you must carefully manage the city’s inhabitants and resources, steadily expanding and rebuilding society.
The relentless environment presents constant challenges, demanding meticulous planning as you establish new districts and infrastructure. If you enjoyed the original Frostpunk, its successor “makes clever reconsiderations of, and expansions on, the first game’s design, offering a better-rounded, even harsher follow-up to the original’s concept.” For newcomers, our Frostpunk 2 tips and beginner’s guide will help you quickly master the basics.
Tiny Glade
Many games on this list can be intense, so we’ve included Tiny Glade as the perfect cozy antidote. In this charming building game, you can unwind and construct the home, castle, or cottage of your dreams. It offers various intuitive tools that are easy for beginners to grasp, yet deep enough for experienced builders to master and create epic works of art.
Tiny Glade’s brilliance lies in how difficult it is to create something visually unappealing, thanks to its simplified tools. While there’s no set objective, you can effortlessly lose hours in Tiny Glade, enjoying its warm and safe environment away from life’s stresses.
Planet Coaster 2
Planet Coaster 2 elevates the excitement of designing your own amusement park, offering an expanded toolkit to bring your dream park to life. The original game’s tools were already intuitive, but this sequel refines and enhances both building and pathing, catering to both new and veteran park creators.
With Planet Coaster 2, developers Frontier Developments solidify their reputation as building game experts, especially when combined with their Rollercoaster Tycoon legacy. This iteration introduces the ability to create dazzling swimming pools and water flumes, setting you on the path to engineering roller coasters that will have your virtual attendees clamoring for the front of the queue.
7 Days to Die
Like many premier building games, 7 Days to Die expertly blends crafting, building, and survival. You find yourself in a zombie-infested post-apocalyptic world, where scavenging, building, and crafting are your only means of staying alive.
After years in highly successful early access, 7 Days to Die has officially launched to continued acclaim. The building aspect is a standout feature in this zombie game, allowing you to equip your base with a variety of traps and exterior defenses to repel the undead for as long as possible. The experience is further enhanced by installing some of the best 7 Days to Die mods, making construction even more rewarding.
Palworld
Palworld captivated the gaming world upon its release last year, shattering player records even amidst controversy surrounding its creators. While a significant draw is its Pokémon-esque monster-catching, leveling, and battling mechanics, Palworld introduces a robust building element not found in Nintendo’s RPG series, akin to Ark or Valheim.
Put your Pals to work mining and gathering resources, transforming wood, metal, and stone into an ever-expanding operational base. Players have crafted truly remarkable bases in this RPG game, from stunning waterfall retreats to massive industrial Anubis compounds, offering abundant inspiration for your own Palworld constructions.
Cities Skylines 2
Undoubtedly one of the finest city-building games available, Cities Skylines 2 promises to engross any aspiring mayor. It provides every tool a building game expert needs to construct breathtakingly intricate cityscapes. If you’re just starting, explore guides on Cities Skylines 2 maps and Cities Skylines 2 taxes to get a grasp on managing your metropolis.
Surviving Mars
Sometimes, Earth simply isn’t enough. Surviving Mars taps into humanity’s fascination with space, tasking you with establishing and maintaining the first functional human colony on the iconic Red Planet. You’ll face challenges similar to those in “The Martian” – every necessity, be it food, water, or oxygen, requires precise infrastructure to cultivate.
Surviving Mars delves deep into detail, ensuring your careful planning addresses the emotional needs of your colonists. This fusion of optimistic futurism and hard sci-fi extends beyond your colony’s domes as you venture across Mars’ storm-swept surface, uncovering strange mysteries that hint at extraterrestrial life.
If you lean more towards games like Fallout than traditional space games, consider Surviving the Aftermath. This installment in Paradox Interactive’s series applies the same design principles as Surviving Mars to a post-apocalyptic future. While it hasn’t received as much post-release development as its predecessor, it’s still a worthwhile experience if you’re ready to rebuild civilization from the ground up.
Townscaper
Many building games integrate city management or survival mechanics, but if you prefer a simpler, more relaxing experience, Townscaper is the perfect alternative. This diorama sandbox game, created by solo developer Oskar Stålberg, offers no challenges or objectives. Instead, you’re free to construct your own whimsical settlement, from quaint seaside hamlets to elaborate urban centers. With just a few mouse clicks, winding streets or grand promenades materialize, snapping together like LEGOs and morphing into new configurations based on your input.
Townscaper is an ideal way to unwind, whether during a lunch break or a commute, much like idle games but with a creative twist. It also serves as an excellent tool for crafting towns or cities for D&D campaigns and can even assist aspiring artists in studying perspective. Whatever your use, this experimental “toy” embodies the pure joy of building.
Teardown
Unlike most building games on this list, Teardown encourages you to create elaborate scenes specifically for the joy of tearing them down afterward. Featuring a campaign steeped in insurance fraud, revenge, and betrayal, Teardown arms you with all the tools necessary to obliterate everything in sight.
Building can often feel overwhelming due to endless possibilities, but destruction offers a different kind of satisfaction. If you enjoy demolition as much as construction, Teardown’s gameplay might be exactly what you’re seeking. While it may seem counterintuitive, we’ve also included Teardown on our list of the best relaxing games for the sheer catharsis of watching structures crumble.
Valheim
While Valheim is primarily a survival game, a sturdy base is essential for safety from troll attacks and Greyling hordes. Much of your time will be spent crafting, fighting, and exploring its numerous biomes. However, players with an architectural flair will appreciate the unique materials and design constraints this Viking game presents. Surviving in the frigid Norse world is challenging enough, and Valheim adds complexity by requiring structural integrity and proper ventilation for your builds.
Beyond creative expression, even the material-gathering process offers a therapeutic rhythm. Relax as you collect different woods and ores to construct your ideal home, complete with chests for treasures, a roaring fire and cooking station, and even a boar farm. Despite potential building constraints, experienced players have overcome these to create magnificent Viking dwellings, from grand longhouses to cozy meadow abodes. Some have even recreated Skyrim’s High Hrothgar or Sauron’s tower from Lord of the Rings.
Planet Zoo
If you appreciate Planet Coaster’s detailed building tools but feel your creations are wasted on ungrateful human guests, Planet Zoo lets you watch magnificent creatures roam your thoughtfully designed enclosures, albeit still for the enjoyment of often ungrateful visitors.
As long as you meet your animals’ habitat requirements, avoid incompatible plants, and provide shelter from the weather and prying eyes, you’re free to construct stunning palaces and immersive viewing stations to showcase your critters. You’ll even release nurtured animals into the wild once they’re strong enough, making this a truly rewarding building game.
The enclosures you design profoundly influence animal behavior. In our Planet Zoo review, we noted an incredible level of detail. For example, building a pagoda too close to a fence led one of our Red Pandas to make a daring bid for freedom, sending zoo visitors scattering from the “menacing delinquent.” Admiring the Planet Zoo animals as they explore your creations offers immense satisfaction.
Satisfactory
Few anticipated that the studio behind Goat Simulator would release an early access building game focused on colonizing a planet by constructing elaborate automated factories. Satisfactory encourages you to design increasingly elegant assembly lines that integrate seamlessly with the alien landscape of your new home.
While building is Satisfactory’s core, you can also engage in light combat, explore terrain with various vehicles, and – thanks to four-player multiplayer – tour the ingenious creations of your friends. The best feature is the ability to explore your factories in first-person, marveling at every automated vehicle, production line, and monolithic processing facility with far greater detail than traditional top-down views allow.
Timberborn
What’s better than constructing your dream city? Building it with an army of beavers! Timberborn is a self-proclaimed “lumberpunk” building game where you lead a small colony of industrious beavers to create their ideal metropolis. These resourceful critters do more than just gnaw through trees; after humans vanished, beavers evolved and adapted to the harsh wasteland, becoming skilled engineers in their own right.
Dams and water wheels are crucial for thriving agriculture, but these are just the beginning. For your beaverfolk’s long-term survival, you must innovate with lumber, designing a city with the infrastructure to support production and wellbeing. You also need to safeguard your population from drought, floods, and toxic waste in post-apocalyptic Earth. Timberborn is an adorable, challenging, and deeply satisfying building game – but let’s be honest, the beavers are the real stars.
Raft
Miles out at sea, with only a few wooden planks separating you from a frenzy of sharks. Not ideal, but manageable. Raft is a building game where fashioning a makeshift pontoon is your primary means of survival. Using a handy hook, you’ll start by scavenging barrels and other flotsam for crafting materials. If you avoid becoming shark bait, your rudimentary raft will gradually transform into a floating paradise. Our guides to areas like Varuna Point and Temperance can help you as Raft has now launched out of early access.
Once established, you can dive for more resources to build your dream floating abode. While the creations might seem standard – shelves, rugs, chairs, and so on – the setting and constant threat make Raft incredibly thrilling. Watching the sunset from your makeshift mansion, with a shark trophy proudly displayed on the wall, offers a unique sense of accomplishment.
Ark: Survival Evolved
While base building can be a creative pastime in other games, in Ark: Survival Evolved, it’s purely about cold, hard survival. If you manage to endure the perilous early moments among dangerous dinosaurs, as we did in our Ark: Survival Evolved PC review, you’ll need to construct shelter quickly to stay safe – otherwise, expect to find only your savaged corpse upon logging back in.
Indeed, when you log out of Ark, your body remains exactly where you left it, in a vulnerable state. Failing to use your survival-building expertise to assemble a smart base and protect yourself from both the elements and other players will swiftly lead to loss of progress, food, farming supplies, and crafting equipment.
All bases require core elements, but beyond that, you can make them as elaborate as you wish. Even greater creativity is possible with the best Ark: Survival Evolved mods. It’s wise to choose a location close to necessary materials. In ascending order of durability, materials include thatch, wood, stone, and metal. Metal, naturally, offers the best protection against potential raiders.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
Real mechanics are mystifying. Cars, to us, seem to run on sheer magic – and we refuse to hear otherwise. That bewildering tangle of pipes, pistons, and cogs is nothing short of wizardry.
However, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 is a car-building game that makes vehicle construction surprisingly understandable even for non-wizards. As your mechanic skills advance, you can expand your vehicle repair empire. Perhaps you’ll even become skilled enough to service the high-performance cars from the best racing games.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 stands out among car-building games for a reason: its extensive array of paint jobs, sprays, and parts allows you to transform broken-down rust buckets into sleek, gleaming racers. What’s the first thing you’ll do once your garage is filled to the brim with beautiful cars? Capture their glory in photo mode, of course.
Fortnite
If you appreciate Minecraft, Fortnite is another excellent building game. It’s also one of our favorite co-op games for collaborative construction with friends, whether fending off hordes in the often-overlooked Save The World mode, engaging in competitive matches, or exploring various Limited Time Modes. And that’s before considering its other form as one of the best battle royale games on PC, where our Fortnite tips can help you achieve victory.
No Man’s Sky
With the No Man’s Sky: Beyond Update, the game fully embraced its potential as a space-faring house-building game. No Man’s Sky allows us to unleash our inner space architect, further enhanced by some useful No Man’s Sky mods.
Available across all four game modes, you can establish unlimited bases throughout the stars, serving as farms, storage hubs, healing stations, shield recharge points, and even homes for the NPCs you recruit across the galaxy. No Man’s Sky has received significant upgrades over the years, from a free graphics update accompanying next-gen console upgrades to an update that lets you become a galactic mayor.
Space is perilous, so ensuring your home can sustain life is crucial. Achieve this by scanning planets from your ship, or by deploying a signal booster on the surface. Once you locate a habitable world, you can begin using your resources to construct a home in a distant galaxy. You don’t have to build your space pad alone; recruit a friend for cooperative space castle construction in multiplayer.
Fallout 4
In earlier Fallout titles, we were content with collecting loot, recruiting colorful companions, and dispatching Raiders with powerful laser weapons. But in Fallout 4, we also gained a house-building game.
Once Preston Garvey inevitably tasks you with liberating another area for the Minutemen, you can start utilizing the junk weighing down your inventory to give post-apocalyptic Boston a fresh look. While prefabricated structures offer a quick start, the tools at your disposal can lead to astonishing Fallout 4 settlements – especially with the aid of some handy Fallout 4 console commands.
As your burgeoning town grows, it’s easy to neglect the main quest and focus on treating Fallout 4 as a de facto house-building game. Inviting wandering entrepreneurs to set up shop and trade in your settlement is just one of many perks you unlock as you attract more inhabitants. You can even establish supply lines between multiple settlements, positioning yourself as a post-apocalyptic property magnate. If this sounds a bit overwhelming, consult our detailed Fallout 4 guides. For Fallout 4 building experts, our Fallout 76 tips can provide a head start on rebuilding the wastes of West Virginia.
Poly Bridge
As much a physics puzzler as it is a bridge-building game, Poly Bridge makes its complex, math-based mechanics remarkably accessible. You’ll have a fair chance at safely guiding vehicles across gaps without plunging them into the water below.
Even if initial attempts fail, the game’s soothing acoustic soundtrack and vibrant art style will temper any frustration over your passengers’ watery demise, as noted in our Poly Bridge review. With 24 challenges in the base game and hundreds more on Steam Workshop, Poly Bridge offers hours of engaging gameplay.
The Sims 4
Building in The Sims 4 requires some practice, so it’s advisable to sketch out your dream home on paper first. Start with simple, square exteriors before tackling more complex designs. Once you’ve chosen a roof, you can experiment with room layouts, decor, and furnishings. Add a pool and a high-end sound system, and even the most discerning Sims might pay a visit.
Trove
Trove is a free-to-play PC game blending building, sandbox, and MMORPG mechanics. Featuring countless realms and biomes, it offers an open-ended adventure from Trion Worlds where you can build to your heart’s content. Your first task is to enhance your cornerstone – your portable home base – to its full potential. When not customizing your home, you can craft new weapons, creatures, and environments with the help of numerous Trove mods and Trove console commands.
To make your cornerstone the envy of other Trove players, you’ll need resources and loot. Fortunately, procedurally generated dungeons keep loot-collecting exciting as you venture through unique worlds and complete quests with friends. Trove stands out as one of the best building games on PC for cooperative play.
Rust
Like Ark, Rust is among the most unforgiving survival-building games available, so keep Rust console commands in mind for a crucial advantage. Similar to Studio Wildcard’s offering, you begin with nothing, cowering from potentially hostile players before you can even find two sticks to rub together.
But once you’ve skillfully scavenged some supplies, defending them becomes paramount. First, you’ll need a building plan to create a ‘twig tier’ foundation – there go your two sticks. This initial tier is one of five, with wood, stone, sheet metal, and armored tiers progressively increasing your protection against raids. Many other methods exist to bolster your base, such as locks and strategic wall placement, but be aware that structures will decay over time, just like everything else in these challenging survival-building games.
Minecraft
Minecraft is the quintessential building game that has captivated millions of gamers worldwide, solidifying its place as the first title that comes to mind when we think of the best building games. You can even generate incredible worlds instantly using the best Minecraft seeds.
For those who’ve been living under a pile of blocks, Minecraft is a sandbox game renowned for its blocky graphics and emphasis on creativity. In its virtually endless world, you can construct impenetrable fortresses and cool Minecraft houses to fend off hostile Minecraft mobs in survival mode, or elevate the challenge in hardcore mode. The possibilities are boundless, and that’s before expanding the game with Minecraft mods and Minecraft maps if your creative well runs dry.
Creative mode is where Minecraft truly shines as one of the best building games on PC. Free from the constraints of the real world, Creative grants you unlimited access to blocks and items. With all limits on your imagination lifted, you can enjoy crafting elaborate creations far beyond what’s possible with physical LEGOs, without any of the cleanup – and if you have Game Pass, it’s even free.
Roblox
Roblox remains one of the most popular games globally, largely due to its blend of creative potential and accessibility. Instead of merely building objects within a pre-designed game world, Roblox empowers you to construct objects, the game world itself, and even entire games.
Explore our list of the best Roblox games for inspiration to kickstart your adventures. We also offer numerous guides on Anime Last Stand codes, Blox Fruits codes, and Grimoires Era codes if you’re looking to gain an edge in these fantastic Roblox titles.
And with that, our construction of the best building games on PC is complete. If you’re seeking a different kind of creative freedom, why not explore the best sandbox games or crafting games?