It may surprise you, but Terraria is a massively successful indie title. It has sold over 35 million copies across all of its platforms. So, it’s one of the most popular sandbox adventure games available.
Selecting Games Like Terraria
Terraria is a comprehensive sandbox experience. You dig through caves, fight for loot, explore a 2D open-world, and build your shelters and gear. Therefore, finding games like Terraria means understanding its various gameplay loops. So, the titles we selected to feature a mix of the following elements:
Genre: Terraria is a sandbox survival action-adventure game in 2D. Crafting: The survival parts mean you gather resources in the world to build gear, shelters, machines, apparel, and more. The crafting system is wide, and you can build a whole world over time.Farming: The game also includes a farming system. You can grow crops and use your farm resources to craft potions, gear, construction materials, and more.Action-adventure: Terraria focuses heavily on the action. You can explore the underground world, randomly generated worlds full of loot, rare resources, and enemies. Open-world: Terraria has an open-world 2D world with no quest markers or paths. You can explore, construct and combat at your will. The surface is also a randomly generated world.Customization: Because of the crafting system, the customization options are large. You can tweak your character’s hair, shirt, pants, colors, genre, and more. Tools: Similarly, the character has a range of tools to shape the world. These tools gather materials and build structures. Character progression: Players start with limited hit points and mana points. Players can increase both by finding items in the world.Spells: The game also has spells. Players can unlock these powers by finding items and armor sets. Combat: Combat is in 2D, and there’re many enemies, enemy types, and bosses to defeat. After defeating a certain enemy, the game automatically raises the difficulty for extra items and enemies. Evolving gameplay: The combat gets increasingly crazier and bigger. You may start swinging slow blows with a pick. Yet, after days in the game, you could be flying while throwing laser beams left and right, and using defensive spells to block the homing missiles of a gigantic centipede.NPCs: After defeating certain enemies, players unlock NPCs. These characters can move to a house you create as long as it fulfills their requisites. There’re 28 out of 33 NPCs who need a home. Trading: There’s an in-game currency as well as NPC traders. You can find the money by defeating monsters, on treasures, selling, and jars.Biomes: Even though the world is randomly generated, there’re biomes. These areas have particular landscapes and enemies, like a forest or a desert. Visuals: Lastly, Terraria has graphics akin to SNES titles, like classic Castlevania or Metroid games.
As you see, there’re a lot of elements in Terraria. However, the gameplay loop is simple: you explore the caves for loot and combat and then use the loot to build houses and machines. But, overall, games like Terraria should have a sense of sandbox-style freedom and creativity.
Games Like Terraria
Minecraft
Minecraft is the definitive sandbox open-world adventure. If you’re a Terraria fan, we advise you to try or come back to Minecraft once again. It has remained the most important game in the genre for so many years for a reason. On Minecraft, you customize a character and reach a randomized, endless open-world. There’re no objectives, and no path markers, so you’re free to do as you choose. That said, the gameplay loop is the same as Terraria. You explore the world (beneath and underground) for loot and combat and then use the loot to build structures and gear. Additionally, you have tools to gather materials and create structures. If you play in Survival mode. Your initial tools are quite limited, as well as your HP. You need to build shelters to protect yourself from the monster at night and get progressively better materials and tools from here on out. If you start on Creative mode, you’re immortal, and you can mine and create anything at any time. Overall, though, Minecraft is a block builder. Everything in the world is a block. You can mine, move, and destroy anything in the world, but you need the right tools to do it. Moreover, Mojang’s game is a free-roam sandbox offering combat, crafting, exploration, and survival.
Valheim
Valheim is an open-world exploration, action-adventure survival game. Unlike most games in the genre, Valheim delivers smooth and satisfying combat. In particular, the game includes a dodge/parry/block attack system. You can play alone or with up to 10 players in a procedurally generated PvE world. The setting is Valhalla, the Norse mythology Haven, where you play as an Odin servant. Still, the struggle is about slowly progressing your character with better and better gear and technologies. So, there’s a story to play, and it’s surprisingly good. However, you have the freedom to discover the world and travel anywhere. As before, the gameplay loop is about exploring, fighting for loot, and using the loot for building gear, structures, and supplies. And as you slay foes, you prove your might to Odin and unlock better and better adventures. That said, this is a Viking world. So, you can build Viking longhouses, ships, castles, forts, armor, and more. You can customize almost anything and progress through building tiers to keep expanding your options. You can also grow crops, prepare food, make potions and meals, and unlock new gear with blueprints.
Subnautica
Subnautica is a perfect entry by a small indie studio. Since its debut, the team has released several updates, upgrades, and an expansion. Overall, it’s a game we never fail to recommend. It’s not an Early Access game, but the dev team releases constant updates almost every month. This is an open-world survival-craft title, but the entire map is an underwater alien ocean. You crash-landed here, and your only way out is going deeper and deeper. However, exploring the world is dangerous, so you need resources to craft machinery, bases, and gears. You have the freedom to explore, but there’s a main quest about unraveling the mystery of your accident and the world around you. That said, you have to manage your oxygen, pressure, and depth as you explore caves, kelp forests, reefs, plateaus, lava canals, tuners, cavities, and more. The map is brimming with life and hundreds of life forms. Some of these are helpful and provide food and resources. Others can hunt you in seconds. So, the gameplay loop is exploring, scavenging, and crafting. As you grow in tech tiers, you can go deeper for better resources and more challenging experiences. And whenever you’re not exploring, you can take time to build high-tech underwater habitats. Yet, these bases are a bit complex: you need to manage depth, pressure increase, hull integrity, and more.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley adds several elements to the sandbox formula. Still, Terraria fans would find it familiar. In summary, it’s a 2.5D farming simulator sandbox with social sim, action/adventure, and RPG elements. You play as a character who inherits the old grandfather’s farm. When you arrive at the ranch in Stardew Valley, you’ll discover an open-ended title, though. You can perform many activities to manage the farm, explore caves for rare resources, and bond with the NPCs in the town. You can grow crops, raise cattle, forage, and more for farming. Then, you can sell the items you produce to buy gear and resources. Anything you do, though, can progress your character in various stats. Overall, the character progression system allows you to improve your characters’ farming and combat abilities. Elsewhere, you can explore large caves to fight against monsters. These adventures can yield the best resources in the game. Because of a fair crafting system, you’ll put these resources to good use. Lastly, I should mention that Stardew Valley has an old-school RPG visual style for Terraria’s SNES graphics fans.
Rust
Rust is a first-person sandbox survival multiplayer game. You go into servers with up to 60 players, either alone or with a party of friends. Here, anything can kill you, from human NPCs to animals and other survivors. The trick is you can either kill or help other players. If you help them, your chance of survival may rise. But if you kill them, you can get all of their loot. This is because Rust has the widest crafting system I’ve seen. You build anything from weapons to full-blown electric grids and helicopters. Naturally, you need resources and blueprints for your craft. You also need to build shelters and forts to store your resources and gear. However, other players can steal your loot, even when you’re offline. Only your defenses like turrets and traps, or other players in the clan, can protect your items. Rust, after 8 years online, has seen over 300 content updates. The gameplay loop has remained similar, though. You explore, loot, shoot, craft, and survive. However, the developers have greatly improved the graphics, AI, maps, and the number of things you can craft.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Ark: Survival Evolved is another game on the open-world first-person survival bracket. You play on one of the maps you select, Arks, and start with nothing but your pants. However, there’re mods and custom servers that tweak the gameplay. Surrounded by dinosaurs, large animals, and nature, you must survive and progress your characters. You can gather resources from nature and animals to build shelters, gear, supplies, and tools for survival. You level up and gain skill points to develop your skill trees for progress. The game has a plethora of survival systems, though. You must deal with temperature, hunger, thirst, and diseases. You must also combat large dinosaurs, tame them if you want, and fight against other survivors. Like on Rust, you can build shelters to store your loot and raid other’s hideouts for their items. Overall, though, Ark offers the Terraria gameplay loop you’re looking for, only on multiplayer servers. You explore, combat, and gather resources. Then, you use these resources for gear and structures. Still, Ark is quite an extensive game, with many complex systems, servers, and maps.
Grounded
Grounded is a survival multiplayer action-adventure game. It’s an Xbox Game Studios exclusive by Obsidian Entertainment. They are the creators of Fallout: New Vegas and Outer Worlds-not Outer Wilds. You play as kids who shrunk to the size of an ant in their own backyard. Either through first-person or third-person, the characters must find their way back to their body. However, you must survive in the meantime in a rich land brimming with danger and opportunity. Moreover, surviving requires managing health, hunger, and thirst. Then, the world has different bug types, and each one serves a purpose. For example, the spiders are the apex enemies, and ladybugs are food sources. Additionally, players can cut grass to collect dewdrops and drink. And because tools, shelters, and supplies are key for survival, the experience is similar to Terraria. That means you explore an open world, gather resources, and hang back at your bases as you craft. So, even though the game has a quest, Grounded still has a unique open-world formula. You’re free to explore the backyard, construct bases, scavenge resources, and craft gear at your pace. All of this gets better with the 4-player co-op mode.
Factorio
Factorio is a construction and management sim. You play as an engineer who crash-landed on an alien planet. The goal of harvesting resources is to create an industry and launch a rocket. The rocket launches a satellite, but the ordeal requires advancing through the tech trees and many hours of playing. It’s also a sandbox game, so you can follow the story or do something else. Moreover, even after you complete the story, you can continue playing. That said, you can play factored alone or in co-op. Also, all of this happens through classic NES visuals, like playing an old-school Sim City title. Either way, the game uses real-time strategy features and survival elements. Players locate resources on the world and then craft tools and machines. Then, they use these tools to create more advanced materials and progress on complex and sophisticated tech trees. The idea is to create automatic factories for mining, transporting, processing, and assembling resources. There’s also a character progression system. Players can research technologies to advance their automation systems. These researches unlock items, structures, upgrades, and more. Ultimately, it leads gameplay towards robots, powered exoskeletons, sci-fi tech, and oil refining.
Trove
Trove is a free-to-play action-adventure block builder and MMO. You join the game as one of the available “Cubular” classes and engage in an endless sandbox experience alone or with your friends. Lore-wise, you join against the forces of Shadow. The battle takes you to tons of dungeons for battle and glory. There, you can hunt for treasure, gather loot, level up your character, and learn new skills. Also, you can craft items, build structures, and trade your items with other players. Trove also has an open world with pixelated looks, just like Minecraft. The world delivers an endless array of randomly generated dungeons. Moreover, you can destroy and explore anything you see. You can build your home and entire worlds together with your friends outside of the dungeons. Trove’s characteristics make it very similar to Terraria but in 3D and simpler graphics. However, it’s nowhere near its popularity levels. For example, in Steam, Trove has about 2K concurrent players every day; Terraria enjoys about 40K daily players.
Spelunky 2
Spelunky 2 is a sequel to 2008’s Spelunky, which we consider one of Terraria’s main influences. The game before was an open-source entry, and while the second title it’s not, it remains a 2D action-adventure game with SNES graphics. Now, this is not a sandbox, but the similarities are extensive. Spelunky 2 is a platformer side-scroller where you play as Ana. She’s visiting the Moon to find her parents. The mission requires navigating through deadly caves, facing hostiles, and collecting treasures. The title also has roguelike elements. If you die, Ana loses her gear and starts from scratch. The maps will be new because the game procedurally generates every setting. Moreover, every map has several layers to explore and monsters, rides, and traps. You can also build your base camp with a fair crafting system to relax and bond with the NPCs outside of your exploration. Overall, Spelunky 2 is a lengthy sequel to one of the first roguelike platformers. If you’re a fan of Terraria’s graphic style and exploration-based combat, you may want to give this title a try. Moreover, although it’0s not a sandbox, the game offers a massive, replayable playground and a highly interactive world.
Stranded Deep
Stranded Deep is an open-world survival game that adds several genre elements to its formula. More importantly, you play alone, stranded on an island, to survive and go back to civilization. However, the developers are not completing their goals. This game has been in Early Access for over six years, and it’s still incomplete. Incomplete features include unstable co-op, messy interfaces, and outdated graphics. The gameplay loop is as per usual. You explore the islands underwater to hunt and gather supplies. Then, you craft tools, weapons, shelters, and supplies. You also need to manage hunger, thirst, and exposure to the elements like the Sun. Then, The world is procedurally generated and delivers distinct islands on an archipelago. You play in the Pacific, and the land is full of dangerous creatures. On top of the animals, you can also suffer bone damage, poison damage, and more. You need to use particular medical supplies to heal from the many things that can hurt you. And whenever you’re not in combat, you can craft gear rafts to explore other islands and shelters. The combat relies on the items you can craft with a first-person perspective. You can make spears, boxes, axes, spearguns, and more. Naturally, you’ll progress on tech trees. Lastly, your activities like combat will level up your character in five different skill trees: cooking, hunting, craftsmanship, harvesting, and physical.
Icarus
Icarus is a PvE survival game where you can play alone or with a party of 8 players. The world you play is a “session,” which means it’s unique for you every time you log in. You play in an alien wilderness, Icarus. It’s a brutal environment you can explore to harvest resources. Then, as usual, you can use the resources to craft machines, gear, and shelters. You play as a “Prospector.” You land on the planet from an orbital station to learn about the alien planet in a series of quests. Each quest takes you to a new area where you need to start fresh, building yourself up from scratch. The goal is to transform Icarus into a planet where humans can live, so you and your friends will conquer the world. Despite the gameplay loop being similar to Terraria, we left the game for last on purpose. There’re plenty of good things about the game, like weather events, a huge crafting system, and top-tier graphics. However, it behaves like an early access title, even though it’s not. The alien planet is mostly empty. A wide selection of bugs, glitches, and performance issues fill the void. For now, keep the game on your radar until you see it’s up to its promises.
