Building News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

During the lengthy Kinda Funny Gamecast interview mainly focused on Fallout, Bethesda's Todd Howard revealed a big Starfield update coming this week to the Steam beta branch. The first story expansion, Shattered Space, will be released this Fall.

Bethesda Game Studios has been promising new content and features for Starfield for a while now, and though updates for the space-faring RPG haven’t been as significant as many would have hoped, more new details have emerged on when to expect some of that. Shattered Space, for instance – which will be Starfield’s first paid expansion – has been given a narrower launch window.

Last year's Alan Wake 2 released to critical acclaim, winning awards such as the game Award for best narrative at the 2023 Game Awards, and this year's BAFTA Game Award for Artistic Achievement.

isn't content to just be an average, everyday city-builder, and the game's commitment to doing something unique goes beyond its central concept. The obvious thing that makes different from other games in the genre is its blend of tactical battles into the mix, which gives it an extra dose of appeal. This isn't the only feature that's hard to find elsewhere, however, and another fairly unique addition also contributes to making its medieval settlements feel more like real places with real people.

Xbox has revealed that one of its studios — UK-based Rare, developer of Sea of Thieves — has constructed a new sustainability-focused studio.

Two Valheim builders spent more than a thousand hours over three months to create an entire RPG within the survival hit.

MMORPGs have offered the promise of player agency and being able to shape the world but those promises usually fall flat beyond the premise of having a stronghold in one part of the world or adjusting tax and trade ratios in another. Bitcraft: Age of Automata aims to break that concept down to the basic voxels by allowing players to literally shape the shared world as they see fit. With a single shared world to craft bit by bit, there's something special in the works with Clockwork Labs, Inc.

Imagine Earth, a city building strategy title that launched a few years back on PC and Xbox, is making the jump to PS5 and PS4 on the 9th May. The game takes place in 2084, and tasks you with creating sustainable civilisation on various alien planets, following on from the greed-driven ruin of humanity's original home. We think developer Serious Bros. is trying to tell us something...

Arcade1Up has been providing us with the chance to have our very own arcades at home for the past six years, whether it's just the one machine we're after for a hit of nostalgia, or we're looking to turn an entire room into our very own retro arcade. A more appealing option than ever before with actual arcades disappearing left and right. While the idea of an in-house arcade is appealing, actually building the cabinets to make that a reality is pretty daunting. That's where TaskRabbit comes in.

Typically, playing city-based or civilization-building games is a relaxing experience for me. There’s an inherent satisfaction in something I created in Cities: Skylines 2 or Mini Motorways running efficiently based on my actions. I’m content with spending dozens of hours crafting a functioning world, and only occasionally having my skills tested in a high-intensity situation. Frostpunk 2 from 11 bit Studios is a city-builder where those feelings are often reversed. Most of my time playing its beta was extremely stressful, as I constantly had to make difficult decisions in order to preserve a society that established itself in a frosty postapocalypse.

Huawei has grand ambitions of completely ridding itself of foreign technology and relying on its resources to get the job done, but it will take a massive investment for the former Chinese giant’s goals to reach fruition. To accomplish this, the company is reportedly putting up $1.66 billion for its R&D chip plant and has employed talented personnel hailing from the likes of ASML to speed up the process.

AI roundup: In a race to bring AI to smartphones, Oppo and OnePlus partner with Google to bring the Gemini Ultra platform to smartphones. This move will allow smartphone brands to provide improved integration of AI. In other news, Adobe is currently developing its artificial intelligence text-to-video generator for which it is buying videos to train the model. Know more about such AI news from today. 

The Battlefield series increasingly seems like a square peg held by a publisher that only owns round holes. Created by EA Dice, overseen now by Respawn CEO Vince Zampella, recently worked on by EA's founded-and-shuttered Ridgeline Studios, and now EA Motive are the latest to be stuck with the beleaguered milsim.

EA’s wider multi-studio Battlefield team has gone through some significant disruptions of late, with Ridgeling Games – the studio that was established to create narrative-driven Battlefield experiences – having been shuttered. Prior to that, EA announced that Need for Speed and Burnout developer Criterion Games had joined that larger team, and now, another notable studio has been added to that list.

Following the release of Update 1.6 for Stardew Valley, a number of new players have jumped into the indie title, including one unfortunate player who learned a hard lesson about their 137 casks needing to be placed in a cellar to be usable. While there are a number of helpful guides for Stardew Valley, fans often find themselves running into common issues spurred on by poor planning.

Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang’s Destiny, the latest title from The Op Games, isn’t just a collaborative deck-building game. The way designer Pat Marino tells it, it’s a concerted effort to adapt Aang’s full adventures, from iceberg to Fire Lord, for the table.

Goblin Stone released almost a month ago, but we haven't written about it yet, and it feels like you should know about it. It's a turn-based RPG, it's a roguelike with permadeath, it's got XCOM-style base-building, its got card-based combat; it is extremely your sort of thing, if you're the exact statistical average of Rock Paper Shotgun readers.

With Diablo 4’s first PTR now live and Season 4 just around the corner, players are experimenting with current builds and exploring new build options in anticipation of the massive changes Patch 1.4.0 will bring. We’ve put together an in-depth guide to building effective Paragon boards for those with a general understanding of the Paragon system that want to try their hand at creating their very own build.To see the full guide to building an optimized Paragon setup, take a look at our Building Effective Paragon Boards Guide. While Diablo 4’s Paragon system is intuitive, achieving perfectly optimized Paragon boards can be difficult.

The “Pokemon with guns” phenomenon Palworld has dropped its latest update, and it’s a fairly beefy one. The big addition is Palworld’s first raid boss, Bellanoir, an intense battle you can adjust the difficulty on for some big rewards. In addition to that, the update brings a number of improvements to building, a bunch of new handy items, and more. You can check out a quick teaser trailer for Bellanoir, below.

Minecraft players are unleashing their creativity with the introduction of the Floatater, a new block added in the recent April Fools' update. This innovative addition has sparked a wave of excitement among Minecraftfans, who are now discovering and sharing the many possibilities it offers for building and crafting within the game.

While 's player base has shrunk considerably since the game's launch in early 2024, the game's first major update may be enough to bring Trainers back with a plethora of new features and additions. Following 's runaway success, developer Pocket Pair made sure to promise the community that it intends to support and grow the experience throughout its early access period. While there was already plenty to do and see across the Palpagos Islands, Update v0.2.0.6 includes some excellent quality-of-life features to make the process of capturing and training Pals significantly easier.

Palworld developer Pocketpair has released the biggest update to the game yet, adding its first raid boss, called Bellanoir, alongside a long list of new content.

Mattel is launching a cute Xbox 360 block building kit — but its price tag is more than double what you'd spend on an actual Xbox 360.

Terraria is apparently entering the “final stretch” of updates for the 2D crafting and exploration game (though whether this will actually be it remains to be seen), and it looks like developers Re-Logic are seeing off their 2D Minecraft-a-like in style. Emphasis on the ssssstyle.

For a little while, it seemed like The Walking Dead was eager to use its popularity as a platform to create an entire universe of zombified television. First, there was the spinoff/prequel Fear the Walking Dead, followed by The Walking Dead: World Beyond and then the anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead. Each one intermingled with the original show, but for the most part, they were intent on telling their own stories. Fast-forward to 2024, and the former two series have ended, while Tales got an order for another season last year with no further news.

The Palworld developers have recently teased a major expansion for the game’s building system. Palworld already has quite an extensive building system which many gamers have been using to craft surprisingly creative bases, but this update could give the community even more options to work with.

When asked about his inspiration for Cataclismo, Game Director Vicent Ramirez has a simple reply: “Legos.”

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lets you build a whole lot of ridiculous contraptions out of mundane parts, and there's nothing more mundane than the portable pot. This item turned out to be one of the game's wildest building options, and during a talk at the Game Developers Conference (broken down by Eurogamer), lead physics engineer Takahiro Takayama explained that this only happened because the devs wanted to keep you from spilling your soup.

By sheer coincidence, today marks exactly 11 years since BioShock Infinite was released. It was by all accounts a masterpiece – a worthy follow-up to 2007's landmark narrative-driven first-person shooter BioShock. But after two excellent DLC episodes were released, creative director Ken Levine resigned and parent company Take-Two closed Irrational Games. Levine started a new, smaller studio for Take-Two called Campfire Games, later renamed to Ghost Story Games. And then everything went quiet, with Levine rarely speaking publicly outside of a GDC talk about "narrative LEGOs" in 2014.

Tomas Sala, the solo dev behind the upcoming Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, is preparing for his extremely unique take on city builders and strategy games to launch against a pair of that space's most established names.

The yellow rubber duckies that were your bathtime play pals have now come to life with Chuck The Duck In: Crossy Seas. It’s a new casual indie game that’s a mixture of roguelike adventure and city-building. Dropped on Android recently, it’s free to play.

Knights in Tight Spaces just debuted as a world premiere in the post show for this year's Future Games Show Spring Showcase - aka the Expansion Pack. We just had to sneak one more surprise in, and what better than the surprise sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces from Raw Fury. 

Before a month of my life vanished into customising cards and rigging decks in Balatro, my desire to conquer dungeons by fixing gambling tools came from playing Slice & Dice. First released in 2020, it's a gauntlet of fantasy turn-based battles where most attacks, abilities, buffs, debuffs, and items are very cleverly handled by mapping them onto the faces of dice. Oh, you're going to make your dice so much better! Now Slice & Dice has finally arrived on Steam in search of a wider audience, accompanied by an update adding oodles of new heroes, enemies, items, and more. For newcomers, hey, it has a demo.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered an extraordinary revelation with its sample collection from asteroid Bennu, unveiling a treasure trove of clues about the origins of life. Initial studies of the 4.5-billion-year-old sample have uncovered the presence of carbon and water, suggesting that the fundamental components for life on Earth may also exist within this extraterrestrial rock.

NASA says as many as four asteroids passed Earth yesterday and all of them did so by close distances. The biggest of them was Asteroid 2024 BD7 which had a width of almost 140 feet, making it almost as big as an aircraft. Now, the US Space Agency has revealed that just one asteroid has been tracked in its orbit which will make its closest approach to Earth today, March 19. However, it is bigger than all of the asteroids that passed the planet yesterday! From size, speed to distance of approach, know all about this building-sized asteroid.

A Palworld player has recently decided to build a huge ship base, sharing the ongoing results of their work so far with the game’s fans. Bases set in the water are not completely unheard of in Palworld, but this gamer is set to build one of the largest ones seen in the community.

The holiday season was over long ago, but the season of sale is still going on! I have the scoop about an exclusive deal for all card slingers and bargain hunters. Slay the Spire is hitting its all-time low price on the Play Store, dropping from $9.99 to $6.99.

Final Factory has already impressed via a couple of demos. It's effectively 'Factorio in space': you construct space bases by chaining together machinery, protect by commanding ships and turrets to fight off alien invaders, then explore the galaxy to secure more resources.

A Far Cry 5 player made an iconic Animal Crossing location in the game using its map editor. Players enjoy using in-game building tools to mix different franchises, whether it be through character creators or map editors. This is especially true for Far Cry 5, which gives gamers the ability to build popular locations from other titles within it.

Have you checked out Modern Community yet? It’s a new laid-back simulation game by Magic Tavern that lets you breathe new life into an entire community just by crushing some pretty challenging puzzles. Trust me, if city-building and puzzle-solving had a baby, it would be this game.

The Pokemon Company created a new subsidiary that has set up shop in the same building as ILCA, the developer of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. In addition to this collaboration, ILCA is the developer of the multi-platform storage application Pokemon Home. It has also worked on the titles One Piece: Odyssey and Sand Land for Bandai Namco.

LEGO Fortnite players have expressed their frustration over the Item Shop's newest offerings, which allow players to purchase bundles of LEGO buildings for surprisingly high amounts of money. The «LEGO Kits» were added to the Shop shortly after LEGO Fortnite's recent update.

If you’re into idle city-building games, then you must have played Paragon Pioneers at least once. The game’s solo indie developer Tobias Arlt is set to drop its sequel, Paragon Pioneers 2, soon. Hitting Android, iOS and PCs, it’s expected to launch on March 11th and is priced at $5.99.

Google Maps, a navigation juggernaut, has continually evolved its platform with advanced features since its inception. However, one basic yet crucial aspect was missing – directing users to the precise entrances of buildings or locations. Acknowledging this gap, Google is now incorporating a feature to address this common navigational challenge.

We've barely had enough time to properly sink our teeth into Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but one of its directors has already confirmed that a good chunk of work on the third and final part of the Remake trilogy is already complete. 

With Tomas Sala’s Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles out this month, the solo developer has released an intriguing new trailer. The demo dropped in January for all platforms, but a Discord user, “Crushius”, received access to the full build. Over 32 hours and utilizing the game’s city-building tools, they created what you see below.

Developer Funcom provided a new look at Dune: Awakening, an upcoming open-world survival MMO game. The new trailer and deep dive into Dune: Awakening comes just days after the opening of the Dune: Part Two film in theaters. The roughly 25-minute presentation gives fans a look at some of the core features coming to the game based on Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi novel, including base-building, combat, and traversal.

Ubisoft hasn’t yet revealed too many official details on Assassin’s Creed Codename Red (including a final title), the next mainline series in the company’s flagship franchise, though new information on the title continues to emerge through leaks. A new report published by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson has shed further light on the game.

One highly dedicated The Sims 4 player has recently gone through the effort of building a large apartment complex for mermaids. The images of their impressive feat of engineering later made the rounds on social media, eliciting praise from The Sims 4 fandom even though the building couldn't serve its planned purpose in the end.

You wake up as the survivor of a shipwreck, with nothing more than the ragged clothes on your back to your name. A short trek away lies the dying captain of the vessel, who mentions the place he was trying to reach– a place called Sacrament. And so, your long and difficult journey begins.

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They say brevity is the soul of wit, and Arrowhead Game Studios has demonstrated that wonderfully with the opening of Helldivers 2. There are two philosophies at the core ofthe game’s narrative: the first is that war is hell, and the second is that the authorities will lie to you about war being hell so that you’re more willing to sign up. Instead of belaboring the point over multiple cinematics and text logs left by other characters, the game opens with a one-two punch that drives the point home in a dark but memorable way.

One Palworld player has shared a helpful building technique that allows them to stack base parts on each other. Palworld features an abundance of PvE activities, one of which is base-building, which requires a lot of resources. Farming natural resources can be pretty time-consuming unless players enlist their Pals to do it for themselves.

In a special Valentine's Day edition of Building Azeroth, Cinematic Narrative Director Terran Gregory and Real-Time Content Cinematic Director Sarah Delahanty detail the technical challenges of portraying the first on-screen kiss in Warcraft history! As part of the Dragonflight story epilogue in Patch 10.2.5, we saw the highly anticipated return of Malfurion Stormrage, reuniting with his long-time love Tyrande Whisperwind and adopted daughter Shandris Feathermoon in their new home at the foot of Amirdrassil. For the first time in Warcraft history, the homecoming is punctuated by an on-screen kiss between reunited lovers. Portraying this embrace in-game is more technically challenging than the simplicity of the act itself, however.

The first Streets Of Rogue was an RPS favourite when it launched back in 2019 (we literally couldn't stop playing it), and we've known for a while now that its sequel, Streets Of Rogue 2, is due to arrive later this year. Ahead of the game's launch, developer Matt Dabrowski has started releasing a series of dev diary videos detailing his design process and how it's all coming together. The latest is about how he creates the game's proc-gen open worlds and biomes, and it's a fascinating watch if you've ever wondered how its particular blend of randomised chaos works behind the scenes.

A Palworld player made the mistake of building their base while holding a rocket launcher and the results were explosive. Pocket Pair's open-world adventure game of exploration, combat, and catching battling creatures, is moving through early access and steadily building a following of fans. Palworld has drawn comparisons to Pokemon for its monster capturing mechanics and other features but, in important ways, it's managed to distinguish itself from the classic franchise. Notably, Palworld has added base-building to the mix.

A dedicated Palworld player has built a replica of Dubai’s famous Burj Khalifa in the game. This player is among the millions of fans who have enjoyed Palworld’s gameplay, from creature collecting and combat to base creation and crafting. Since its release, Palworldhas taken the gaming world by storm with incredible player counts and a vibrant online community already growing rapidly.

When I first saw Never Grave: The Witch And The Curse rising up the Steam Next Fest charts at the end of last week, I thought, "Oh! That's a neat Hollow Knight-looking Metroivanida roguelike, I'll definitely give that a go." And having played its demo over the weekend, I can confirm: it's certainly an intriguing little thing that I'll be keen to keep an eye on when it launches into early access, possibly sometime next month.

A Minecraft player has spent 100 hours recreating the Allegiant Stadium in celebration of Super Bowl 58. Super Bowl 58 is set to take place on February 11, but this Minecraft fan has taken multiple play sessions to create the arena that it takes place in.

A vocal portion of the Palworld fandom has recently taken to social media to ask Pocketpair to add corner roofs and a few other junction assets to the hit game. Their pleas add to the list of feature requests that Palworld players have put together to date.

As many of you know, two weeks ago, there were a series of changes made to the Overwatch team, as well as other teams across Blizzard. Writing a public blog is difficult in the wake of these events. I want to express gratitude for the absolutely amazing people who worked on our game that are no longer on our team. I want the community to feel informed, and I want to convey our excitement about what is to come in Season 9. To be honest, it’s a lot to balance – but one of the things we’ve been most proud of is how we’ve kept lines of communication open between the team and our community, and we intend to continue that.

The genre-defining card game Dominion is now available as an Android, iOS, and PC app. Released physically in 2008, it’s the first modern deck-building game, distinct from collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering. Players can now experience this massively influential game for free on their PC and mobile devices.   

A Palworld player has built a giant ramp to exit their base and recommends that other gamers follow suit. Palworld has become 2024’s first surprise hit and has captivated gamers worldwide. Most players have found that the Pocketpair hit blends the monster-catching and survival genres to create a satisfying gameplay loop.

A Palworld player posted a helpful tutorial that shows how to easily build an aesthetically pleasing roof. While fans enjoy Palworld's base-building features, many users run into finicky issues that can make things a bit frustrating.

A Palworld player has taken on the immense task of recreating Attack on Titan's Shiganshina District in the game. The adventure game that blends monster-catching, combat, exploration, and building has just entered early access, but it's already attracted scores of players and is building a passionate community. These fans have begun sharing tips with one another as well as bragging about their various Palworld accomplishments.

Now see here Ollie Toms, supposed guides editor of this supposed videogames website - if Enshrouded really does have "the best building system in the survival genre" then why does the floor of my hovel look like a petrified sneeze? I was innocently carving myself a nice stone foundation last night when the Devil jogged my elbow and I dug a massive, raggedy trench straight through it. I've spent an hour now trying to fill in the trench and flatten it out, to no avail. There's always a jaggedy bit right in the middle, and I'm getting displaced trypophobia from the awareness that my efforts have seeded the terrain beneath with random cavities.

The first Palworld roadmap is here, with developer Pocketpair promising improvements, but only after it's addressed the mass of bug reports it's facing after its smash-hit success.

I've been eyeing up this nostalgic house-building sim for what feels like forever, and it finally has a release date. 

Pocketpair’s Palworld is available in early access, amassing nearly 300,000 concurrent players on Steam (now at 358,867). In a new Steam post, the developer revealed that the project started with only four developers, gradually growing over its three-year development period.

is the latest post-apocalyptic PC city builder that delves deep into the stark realities of how the human industrial complex may eventually doom Earth. Developed by newcomers Core Engage and published by Daedalic Entertainment, the game entered its Early Access phase on January 18, 2024. In what is quickly becoming a crowded field of quality city-building games, stands out as a solid entry with a few unique concepts melded together for a sometimes overly complex but generally satisfying experience.

Publisher astragon Entertainment and developer Randwerk will release physics-based destruction building game ABRISS: build to destroy for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series on March 7 for $19.99, the companies announced. Digital pre-orders are available now.

Rewinding time to the earliest days of Rome, from a time before the republic was founded, Citadelum is a city builder with a little bit of a difference. Sure, you’re founding a settlement, looking to grow and expand, but you’ll be doing so while the pantheon of gods can walk among your populace.

Cast your mind back to May last year and you might remember EA canvassing The Sims 4 players to see if they'd prefer to see the game receive a Medieval Castle or High Tech Futurism themed building pack at some nebulous future point. Well, Medieval Castle (wrongly) won the vote, and some eight months later it looks like the DLC is ready for an imminent release.

In what feels like a tradition now, the next Sims 4 kit has seemingly leaked - and it looks like it'll let us build our very own castles.

Some of the makers of planet-tossing real-time strategy game Planetary Annihilation are working on a sequel, called Industrial Annihilation, which aims to blend together RTS combat with factory building. It's now in its last week of investment funding and is aiming to release into early access sometime this spring.

Penicillin. The Moon landing. Wireless telecommunications. These are just a few of the mad grasps for god's power that humanity has attempted in the last couple of centuries, and now their pantheon is joined by another ludicrous, transcendent venture. A heroic modder has slotted a ladder the height of the actual, genuine, real-life Empire State Building into FromSoft classic Demon's Souls. Then they climbed it. Then they died.

For 14 grueling years, a single question has dominated the inner machinations of my mind like a black hole in a library. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder, sometimes for hours at a time, how long it would take to climb an Empire State Building-sized ladder in Demon's Souls. So I'm pleased and frankly relieved to report that this important matter can finally be put to rest.