Crafting is a gameplay mechanic that has been added to a lot of different games in recent years, not just survival crafts. Some systems have been really simple, featuring only a few hundred items here and there that players can make, while others are absolutely massive and take center stage in gameplay. From building complex factories to medieval weapons and even deep space habitats, crafting has also come in a ton of different flavors.
Open-World Games With The Best Crafting
Craft weapons, armor, and more in the best open-world crafting games on the market. In some cases, the options feel limitless.
Here, the focus is on games that come with the most amount of craftable items. Now, this is pretty difficult to measure exactly. The question of what is considered a craftable item is not always easy to define in each game, as there are variants and tiers that further complicate the matter, and multi-chain recipes, and full information on the exact numbers for each game here is not widely available. With that in mind, these are my best guesstimates of approximate craftable item counts, ranked from lowest to highest.
No Man’s Sky
Several Hundred Craftable Items
Though No Man’s Sky is at the end of the ranking, it is by no means a game with few craftable items. On the contrary, it’s crafting heaven for all space-faring sci-fi lovers who love to explore alien planets.
Recipes and processes can get pretty complex as you go on to craft all manner of things from your own techy space bases, cool starship, cooking food, creating consumables, and various upgrades for your exosuit, for instance. And that’s without getting into Refining, which is essentially a bit like crafting but converts some of your resources into more, well, refined ones.
Valheim
Around 300 Or More Craftable Items
Let’s leave the sci-fi setting for now and go back in time to the age of the Vikings. Valheim drops you into an increasingly dangerous Viking-themed survival craft open-world, where each biome you progress into challenges you more than the previous one.
To survive and thrive against enemies and bosses, you’ll have to build shelter, upgrade your gear, make potions, cook food, and, of course, craft tools so that you can harvest and farm for the very resources required to craft in the first place. Some recipes are locked behind specific workstations, so you’ll have to keep upgrading your base and discover new resources a la Minecraft style to get your hands on every single one.
Vintage Story
At Least Over 300 Craftable Items
Vintage Story will tickle that Minecraft itch for any crafting enthusiasts, but it adds several deep layers of survival and challenge into a game that feels very much like Minecraft, but isn’t. Some things are crafted through knapping, while others use a more traditional crafting grid.
Games With Deep Base-Building Freedom
These games allow players to unleash their full creativity when building bases.
Weapons need to be made at an anvil with special tools like tongs and a hammer, so, needless to say, players will be spending a lot of time gathering the right ingredients, foraging, and farming in order to craft more and more on their quest for survival. Definitely give this one a shot if Minecraft is starting to get a little too easy for you.
Minecraft
Over 500 Craftable Items
Being the ultimate open-world sandbox survival craft, Minecraft probably has roughly 500 or more craftable items. Over the years, there’s been a ton more variety added in, with different types of stones, bricks, and even wood. As you pick up and harvest new items in the game, you’ll automatically learn new crafting recipes that can be found in your recipe book in your inventory.
Then, you just make them on a crafting bench. It’s not the deepest system around, but it’s the most accessible, while also being incredibly diverse. Plus, you can always dive super deep into everything redstone or even modded Minecraft if the vanilla version just doesn’t have enough stuff for you. My personal favorite? RLCraft or RLCraft Dregora. You’ll have hours of grinding, challenge, and crafting at your fingertips, mixed in with some RPG elements.
Factorio
Over 500 Craftable Items, Possibly Far More
As they say, the factory must grow, and that means crafting more and more in Factorio. This is an ideal game for those who are tech-minded and love making complex contraptions, automating their processes, and who value efficiency (or not, the choice is yours). The game easily has at least 500 craftable items, but that’s a low, generous estimation.
With all the tech available as you progress and build up your massive factory, this number explodes pretty fast. Like in No Man’s Sky, you also have the process of refining certain resources, which is sort of also considered part of the crafting here for the sake of simplicity. If redstone from Minecraft was just a beginning for you, this is the next crafting game you should try for the sheer possibilities it holds.
7 Days To Die
Well Over 600 Craftable Items At Least
600 is a pretty generous estimate for 7 Days to Die, the final amount being probably somewhere upward of 700 or 800, and that’s mainly thanks to all the upgrades and variants of items available later in the game. Like in Vintage Story and Valheim, you’ll need specialized workstations to be able to craft certain items.
For example, if you plan on making some first aid kits, you’ll have to either find a Chemistry Station or build one yourself with resources you’ve scavenged. The workstation will cover a ton of items on its own, but getting yourself specialized stations will help you save up on crafting costs and time. For those who like zombie survival and would like a deep crafting system mixed in with base-building as well, it’s pretty much the perfect pick.
Ark: Survival Evolved
Over 700 Craftable Items
So, maybe zombies aren’t your thing, and you’d rather roam around an exotic island riddled with dinosaurs, in which case ARK: Survival Evolved is more your cup of tea. It has a pretty impressive variety of craftable stuff, too, from everything you’d need to construct a shelter to weapons, tools, and even clothing.
Minecraft: 35 Insanely Useful Redstone Contraptions
When it comes to crafting, Minecraft is pretty simple, except when it comes to redstone. Lucky for players, we share helpful designs for the game.
ARK’s recipes are usually behind blueprints, which don’t require any Engram Points but take up inventory space, and Engrams, which are permanently unlocked recipes requiring the use of Engram Points. There are a ton of these recipes, and you’ll need thousands of Engram Points to fully unlock them all, including the DLCs’ stuff as well, so you won’t be out of things to do any time soon in this game.
Conan Exiles
Possibly In The Thousands With All the Add-On Stuff
Getting towards the really massive crafting games, Conan Exiles drops probably into the thousands in item count. All the usual crafting categories are found here, as it’s another survival craft game, from weapons, shelter building objects, to armor and tools to harvest the things you need to keep crafting.
Discovery won’t be enough for you to get your hands on all the recipes here. Instead, you have to level up and gain Knowledge, and different objects require a different workstation to be crafted at. Namely, weapons will need a Blacksmith Bench, and potions will have you first make an Alchemist’s Bench. Then, further down the line, you’ll upgrade these workstations to higher-level ones. It’s a pretty layered system.
Wurm Online
Thousands Of Items
For the last two, it’s hard to say exactly who’s stop dog between Wurm Online and Terraria, but we’ll start with the former, which features probably thousands of craftable items. While some items require specific workstations to be refined, such as the anvil when it comes to refining iron, most of the crafting happens in a pretty straightforward way in your crafting screen. This allows you to combine two items together, and even queue up multiple items of the same type to craft in bulk.
However, a word of warning, because each item is marked with a different percentage of your ability to craft them. Just because you know a recipe doesn’t mean you’ll actually be successful at crafting the item in question, and it will largely depend on how skilled you are, as well as how good the materials and tools you possess are. If this intrigues you, be prepared for a motherload of recipes from furniture to building items to tools, weapons, armor, and other such things.
Terraria
Over 2000 Craftable Items
The other king of craftable items is, without a doubt, Terraria. This charming 2D sandbox survival game with a hefty dose of RPG elements over Minecraft comes with a pretty staggering number of recipes. Armor, weapons, and tools alone have a lot of varieties, ranging from wizard robes to Stardust armor. You’ll have to acquire better tools, defeat certain bosses that are either found or summoned, and discover ores in your world to progress from one set to another.
And that only covers gear. There’s also furniture to design the perfect house for yourself and the quirky NPCs, food, potions, building items… Like many other games listed here, Terraria also takes advantage of various workstations like the furnace, sawmill, loom, imbuing station, and so on. Once you engage hard mode after a certain boss fight, the scope of the game expands to even more crafting possibilities.
These fantastic survival games are not only great solo but can be enjoyed with friends, too. Here are the very best of co-op survival games.
