Crafting systems have become a defining feature in many games, giving players control over how tools, weapons, machines, and entire bases come to life. Instead of simply collecting gear, players often gather raw materials, refine them, and then build equipment needed to survive or expand their base. This process creates a sense of ownership over progress since success depends on planning, resource management, and understanding how different systems connect.
Upcoming Games with Deep Crafting and Base Building Systems
For players who love crafting and base-building, keep an eye out for these upcoming games.
Some titles focus on survival, asking players to craft materials for shelter, food supplies, and defence. There are also games that lean toward industrial growth, encouraging massive automated factories or economic networks powered by player-made goods. Across these different genres, crafting is one of the most important parts of these games and cannot be ignored.
No Man’s Sky
Crafting For Survival And Expansion Across The Galaxy
- Resources in the hundreds, gathered from planets and space, are refined into upgrades, base parts, and advanced technology.
- Blueprints unlock crafting paths that support exploration, ship upgrades, and large planetary settlements.
No Man’s Sky’s crafting is spread across its vast, procedurally generated universe and touches nearly every part of gameplay. Almost every action, from traveling to upgrading equipment, building bases, and repairing damage, depends on crafted items. Unlike some games where players know all recipes from the start, No Man’s Sky uses blueprints that players unlock by finding them in abandoned buildings, purchasing them from vendors, or earning them as quest rewards.
Also, many crafted items exist only to support further crafting, forming long chains where simple resources turn into advanced technology. For example, basic minerals may be refined into alloys that power ship upgrades or base structures. Equipment such as exosuits, starships, and multitools can be upgraded with crafted components, making crafting directly tied to the player’s progress.
Minecraft
Crafting Forms The Foundation Of Survival, Building, And Automation
- Nearly every tool, weapon, and structure comes from combining gathered resources through crafting recipes.
- Crafting evolves from basic survival gear to advanced systems like farms.
Minecraft’s crafting system is one of the most unique in gaming. Players start in a randomly generated world where they explore, mine, and collect raw materials like wood, stone, and ore. The simplest form of crafting happens directly in the player’s inventory using a 2×2 grid. This basic crafting can make things like wooden planks, sticks, and a crafting table. The crafting table itself expands the crafting space to a 3×3 grid and opens the door to almost every major recipe in the game.
What makes Minecraft deep is not just the hundreds of craftable items, but also the way almost everything the player uses or builds stems from crafted materials. Some recipes require ingredients placed in a specific shape, like arranging iron ingots in a particular formation to make shears, while others are shapeless, so the ingredients can be placed anywhere on the grid so long as they’re all present.
Factorio
Automation Of Industrial Production Lines
- Automated machines craft components continuously, turning raw resources into complex items.
- Players design massive production chains that efficiently create advanced technology and research materials.
Factorio changes the focus of crafting from the item itself to the process of making it. While a player can manually craft a few iron gears in their inventory, the game is designed to show that human hands are too slow for big goals, so the process has to be automated. Factorio provides a wide range of machines — from assemblers to furnaces and chemical plants — that can automate crafting. For example, a furnace can convert iron ore into iron plates without player input, and an assembly machine can take those plates, plus other materials, and automatically craft more complex items like circuits or engines.
15 Best Games With Immersive Crafting
Many games nowadays implement crafting systems, not all of which are great. These crafting mechanics, however, are the best of the bunch.
The real depth comes from linking these machines together into factories where each machine feeds its output into the next one. A production line might start with mining drills pulling ores from the ground, move through smelters turning ores into plates, and continue through assembly machines, eventually making advanced products like electric engines or modules that boost factory efficiency. Because machines cannot craft intermediate items automatically, players have to set up multiple machines in sequence, each dedicated to part of the production process.
Satisfactory
Crafting Evolves Into Automated Factories
- Machines transform mined resources into advanced components through complex production lines.
- Expanding automation becomes essential for unlocking new technology and scaling production.
When it comes to crafting in Satisfactory, it’s basically like a massive engineering project. While a player can sit at a Craft Bench and click a button to make a few iron plates, the game's true purpose is to automate that process entirely. The game begins with basic manual crafting, but this phase exists mainly to teach the player how production works. Very quickly, progress depends on building machines that craft items continuously. Resources such as iron, copper, limestone, and coal are extracted using miners and transported using conveyor belts.
The system becomes even more interesting through the use of the Molecular Analysis Machine (MAM) and Hard Drives. Players can explore the world to find crashed ships containing hard drives. When scanned, these drives unlock Alternate Recipes. For example, a player might find a way to make screws directly from iron ingots, skipping the need for iron rods. This allows for total customization of a factory. A player can decide whether they want to use a recipe that saves electricity or one that uses fewer raw materials. Everything builds toward the Space Elevator, a massive structure that requires thousands of high-tech parts to reach the next tier of technology. By the end of the game, the player is managing fluids in pipes, balancing power grids, and using trains to move resources.
Life Is Feudal: Your Own
Quality-Based Crafting
- Crafting depth grows as characters train in skills like blacksmithing, construction, farming, and other professions.
- Complex projects often require cooperation, encouraging specialized crafting roles.
The crafting system in Life is Feudal: Your Own is designed to be as realistic as possible, focusing on a medieval setting where nothing is easily gained. One of the most unique features is the quality system. Every item and material has a quality level from 1 to 100. A finished tool's quality is determined by a combination of material quality, the quality of the workstation used, and the player's skill level.
As a player’s skill level rises, more complex crafting options appear. Low-skill characters produce rough tools and basic structures; skilled crafters can create high-quality weapons, armor, furniture, and fortified buildings. Quality matters because better items last longer and perform better. There’s no shortage of craftable items in Life is Feudal, as players can craft over 750 items if they have the patience.
7 Days To Die
Crafting And Base Building Are Key To Surviving Zombie Hordes
- Recipes, perks, and workstations allow players to craft weapons, vehicles, medicine, and defenses.
- Continuous upgrades are needed to survive increasingly dangerous enemy attacks every seven days.
In 7 Days To Die, the crafting system is tied directly to a player’s ability to scavenge and explore. Crafting allows players to make vehicles, tools, weapons, armor, medical supplies, food, and building materials. Almost nothing needed for survival appears automatically. Items have to be crafted using materials scavenged from the world or looted from abandoned structures.
Items have a quality range from 1 to 6. A level 1 stone axe is easy to make but breaks quickly and has low damage, while a level 5 axe is much more efficient. The level 6 items are special because they are usually only found in the world or earned as rewards, not crafted. This encourages a loop of looting and building. To make advanced items, players must build several workstations: a Forge for smelting iron and lead, a Workbench for complex tools, and a Chemistry Station for gunpowder and medicines. Crafting also involves finding specific parts. For instance, to build a motorcycle, the player must craft or find the engine, the wheels, and the chassis. This system ensures that players are always searching for the next piece of the puzzle.
Vintage Story
Realistic, Boxy Crafting Simulates Historical Toolmaking And Survival
- Hands-on crafting systems include knapping stone, shaping clay, and forging metals through multistep processes.
- Survival progression mirrors technological development from primitive tools to advanced metallurgy.
Vintage Story is one of the most realistic crafting games out there because it focuses on the physical effort of making things. It does not use simple buttons or menus for its core mechanics. Instead, it uses a system called voxel-based crafting. If a player wants to make a stone tool, they have to perform a task called knapping. This involves placing two stones together and then clicking on individual small pieces to chip them away until a blade or an axe head is visible. If a player makes a mistake and chips off the wrong part, they have to start over again. This same logic applies to making clay pots and bowls, where a player must place clay layer by layer, almost like a 3D printer, to form the shape they want before firing it in a pit kiln.
To make metal tools, a player cannot simply click an anvil. They have to first find ore, crush it, and smelt it in a bloomery to get workable metal. Then, they must heat the metal in a forge until it glows a specific color. Once it is hot enough, the player places it on an anvil and uses a hammer to move the glowing metal voxels into the shape of a tool. Because each crafting method can be its own activity, Vintage Story’s crafting feels deep and tactile, pushing players to learn each stage from raw material to finished product.
EVE Online
Player-Driven Industry Crafts The Universe’s Ships And Economy
- Players manufacture ships, weapons, and equipment using mined and refined resources.
- Crafting connects directly to the game’s economy, trade networks, and large-scale wars.
EVE Online treats crafting as a serious profession rather than a convenience feature. The game takes place in a shared universe where nearly every usable object exists because a player made it. Ships, weapons, ammunition, modules, rigs, and many deployable structures are not created by the game itself; they are produced by players using materials gathered from the universe. These materials come mainly from mining asteroids, salvaging destroyed ships, and processing loot gained through exploration or combat. Once gathered, raw materials must be refined into minerals before they can be used for production.
Since almost everything is player-built and player-traded, crafting links into the broader in-game economy. What one person makes might be sold to another, shipped across systems, or used to outfit an alliance’s fleet. Massive crafting operations can involve complex networks of miners, haulers, refiners, and manufacturers all cooperating to produce high-level items. No matter if they’re building basic modules or rare capital ships, players in EVE Online engage with a crafting system that feels like running a real industrial empire in space.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Crafting For Survival
- Engram unlocks and crafting stations allow progression from primitive tools to advanced technology.
- Crafted equipment and structures help tame creatures and defend against escalating threats.
In ARK: Survival Evolved, crafting is at the center of survival on a hostile island filled with dangerous creatures and environmental threats. Players begin with almost nothing and have to craft virtually everything they need to stay alive. Crafting knowledge is unlocked through engrams, which are learned by spending points earned by leveling up. This system forces players to make choices about what to craft, since not every engram can be unlocked early on.
10 Open-World Games With the Best Crafting
A lot of open-world games have in-depth crafting systems that allow players to create a plethora of useful items - here's some of the best ones.
Basic crafting can be done directly from the character’s inventory. Simple tools, weapons, and building parts rely on materials gathered from the environment, such as wood, stone, fiber, and hide. As players advance, crafting shifts toward specialized stations. Items like metal weapons, armor, firearms, and electronics cannot be made by hand; they require structures such as the Smithy or Fabricator. These stations act as progression gates and demand refined materials like metal ingots, cementing paste, polymer, and electronics. Just to understand the scale of crafting possible in ARK: Survival Evolved, the Fabricator can craft around 91 items, while the Smithy allows players to craft up to 236 items.
Terraria
A Sandbox Where Crafting Drives Exploration And Combat Progress
- Crafting unlocks stronger gear, tools, and stations as players explore deeper biomes and defeat tougher enemies.
- Thousands of craftable items support combat, building, movement, and survival.
Terraria’s crafting system may look simple at first, but it quickly becomes a deep and layered part of the game’s progression. When players gather materials like wood from trees, ore from underground, or even strange drops from enemies, those raw materials don’t just sit in a bag. They’re the basis for making almost everything the player will use.
Players occasionally have to stand near crafting stations such as furnaces, anvils, or looms for certain recipes to work, and having multiple stations nearby expands the list of craftable items shown. Players can craft over 1,200 items in Terraria, and as an open-world game that gives players the freedom to do whatever they like, they can spend hours just crafting items.
Best JRPGs With Complex Crafting Systems
Crafting as a mechanic has made many appearances in JRPGs, but the following games undoubtedly did the best job of creating a complex system.