Dwarf Fortress Alternatives and Similar Games

RimWorld is a sci-fi sim heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress where you build your colony featuring characters with various positive and negative traits on randomly-generated worlds in which hostile threat can appear at any moment. The open-ended gameplay at offer allows for everyone to experience a unique game on each playthrough, making your own diverse and interesting stories to tell others about. Colonists have various backgrounds and professions, and each of them reacts to certain situations in a different way. They may form and break relationships while wounds, hunger, fatigue and more affect how they feel. Managing your colonists and ensuring they are happy are just some of the things RimWorl

In Gnomoria you manage a group of gnomes in a sandbox environment where you create the kind of settlement that you want. With a fully destructible, procedurally-generated map, you get to shape the terrain to the way you like and dig deep down below the surface. With plenty of items to craft and various useful objects to build that help you make a fortified base, Gnomoria is a somewhat simpler yet still complex sim that can be enjoyed for hours on end and even improved thanks to mod support.

I doubt that you’ll be able to find a better prison management game than Prison Architect, one of the most unique management sims out there that excellently gives you an idea of what it’s like to manage a prison. While there is a Story Mode that helps you learn the basics of the game, Sandbox Mode is the real deal that gives you the freedom to build the most secure prison in the way that you want. Keeping baddies locked away and in order is not the only thing you get to do in Prison Architect. In fact, you get to play as a prisoner yourself thanks to the game’s fun Escape Mode which lets you figure out a way to break out of your very own prisons. So if you ever wanted to play a game about constructing and managing a maximum security prison, then Prison Architect is the best title to check out.

Factorio isn’t about managing dwarves or building large colonies where you have to meet the needs of the population; instead, it’s a game about creating complex factories either alone or with friends. You can play through the campaign to slowly figure out how things work, or try out various scenarios including ones made by the community. Freeplay scenario is the key part of the game however, as here you get to do whatever you want while making the most efficient automated factories in random 2D maps and defending everything you’ve built from a variety of different monsters. Although you can make your own scenarios using the map editor, you can also enjoy designing the biggest factories together with your friends in multiplayer. The possibilities are endless in Factorio, and the many creations shared by players around the world truly

Banished has you raising a settlement in a land far away from cities, surrounded by nature. Weather conditions, illnesses, health and more all have an effect on your settlers who slowly get older as they work and eventually die, raising children before they do so. Resource management is at the core of Banished, as you assign the population to a variety of different professions, including mining, farming, fishing, woodcutting and more.

Featuring lovely, simplistic voxel graphics, Stonehearth has you building any type of city that you want in procedurally-generated worlds where zombies, skeletons and goblins and epic titans look to destroy everything you’ve accomplished. With the game’s building designer system, you are able to make your buildings look just the way you want, letting you truly create a unique settlement. Or you can simply use one of the many available building templates made by the developers or find various great templates made by the community. Stonehearth also has you ensuring the happiness of your hard-working Hearthlings; your settlers who can have many different kinds of jobs. With mod support included, there is no shortage of great fun to be had in this cute and great city-builder.

Planetbase has you building a space colony on 4 different types of planets, each with their own weather conditions and challenges. As you gather resources and grow food, you also manage your population and set up guards to help take out any intruders that may sneak in disguised as a visitor or a colonist. Use engineers to build bots who can help do certain tasks much more efficiently. Meteors, sandstorms and more await you in this challenging but fun space title that is worth checking out if you’re into space games.

Craft The World is a highly enjoyable and in-depth sandbox game that you will definitely enjoy if you like Dwarf Fortress. This unique-looking 2D title has you constructing a dwarf fortress while ordering your fellow dwarves to do various tasks in randomly-generated sandbox worlds where monsters come out of portals and lurk deep underground. Use a simple crafting system as you protect the dwarves with a variety of different towers and cast spells that can keep them safe but also help in exploration.