Survival & Crafting News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

I spend a portion of my every week surviving and crafting. And in the game, where the game is called Minecraft. I still have appetite left for Tinkerlands: A Shipwrecked Adventure, a demo that offers topdown, 2D construction and fights with giant frog bosses, among others.

Manor Lords is obviously this week's big survival-citybuilder game release, but I suspect Diluvian Winds is more my pace. It's a "relaxing management game" about building a town for anthropomorphic animals around the foot of a lighthouse, although exactly how relaxing will depend on your ability to prepare for tsunamis and other weather emergencies which can strike and destroy your buildings. It's out now.

The announcement trailer for Lost Legions opens with a Roman Emperor bellowing “GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS” like a kid who’s just had his pudding taken away. I'd just had a big swig of coffee before watching, and was instantly swept off by visions of an apoplectic Roman bigwig rampaging through the forests of darkest Germania, gluing abducted legionnaires together into a sort of Octavian katamari... and then they revealed that it’s another open world survival game, with no less than two trailer beats dedicated to the act of hacking down a tree.

Co-op smash-hit Lethal Company has received its first update in a couple of months, and it’s a biggie! Version 50 brings a new map and some new creatures to contend with, alongside some changes that make being a shovel-wielding monster-slayer or speedrunning the game a bit less easy.

Among your obvious blockbuster video games ripe for similarly blockbuster film and TV adaptations like Fallout, Borderlands and The Last of Us, it seems there’s room for some of the smaller gems to be fished out and brought to the big screen, too.

Cosmic horror fishing game Dredge is getting a live-action film adaptation.

This month's RPS Game Club pick is Lethal Company, the indie co-op horror game where you must collect scrap for a mysterious Company or face the ultimate penalty... being fired.

Is there a definitive geological difference between rock and stone? Google tells me the main consensus is that stones are just smaller rocks, which sounds like a flimsy distinction to base a catchphrase on. I’m not sure when this would come up, unless maybe you were a biblical heretic trying to dunk on the people bludgeoning you to death by correcting them in some last gasp pettiness, but it still bothers me. Anyway, colony survival game First Dwarf cares not for rock, only stone, along with the wood you’ll use as the building blocks of your colonies. This is me burying the lede deeper than the mines of Moria, of course, because First Dwarf also has a tiny talking dragon companion that sits on the shoulder of the giant dwarven mech you use to swing a hammer at horrible toxic shitlizards. The dragon learnt your language by sneaking herself in a library. Do go on, game.

Palia, a cute-looking life sim MMO inspired by e.g. Stardew Valley, has been in beta since last year, but now it's officially out on Steam, where many more people can download and play it. With this launch comes a pretty substantial update - Patch 0.178, full notes here - which adds a new questline and Temple to explore, new furniture, and a bunch of new spring flowers and trees to grow in your garden. There is also a giant plushi frog, listed under 'Adjustments'. The patch notes say simply "What does he want? Does he come in peace?" which makes him sound way more sinister than I think he is, but as you can see from the screenshot, he isn't not sinister.

Developer Mojang has warned anyone playing Minecraft through the Xbox app on PC not to download its latest update as it could cause their worlds to disappear.

The studio behind unexpectedly decent Mickey Mouse life sim Disney Dreamlight Valley are venturing into another fantasy land where anthropomorphic animals adventure with human chums, the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dungeons. Today Gameloft announced they're making a D&D game offering a "hybrid of survival, life simulation and action RPG". They don't have much more to share about the game, not even a name, so presumably it won't be out for some time. Whatever it might be, it's headed to PC and consoles.

Ukrainian developer Frogwares has announced The Sinking City 2, for launch on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2025.

Terminator: Survivors, the previously untitled open-world Terminator game announced by publisher Nacon back in July 2022, has resurfaced with a new cinematic trailer and a Steam early access launch day of 24th October this year.

Almost two years after announcing a survival game based on the Terminator movies, Nacon today revealed the game is named Terminator: Survivors and will enter early access in October. It's set in 2009 after the end of the world, and will see us scavenging to get by as a fledging resistance begins to form. Expect cooperative multiplayer, solo play, base management, and a trailer which doesn't show much of anything.

The Brew Barons unfolds in a horrifying world where most agricultural tasks and outdoor mechanical activities are carried out using the medium of heavily armed seaplanes. Need apples for cider? Fly through the trees, cannons ablazing. Need to gather wheat? Fly the plane through the field using its propeller as a scythe, with hardier types of wheat requiring tougher propeller blades. Need to haul up scavenge from the ocean floor? Use the plane's sea anchor as a rudimentary fishing claw. Need to open a box you found on the beach? The plane's the thing, etcetera.

If you’d been gazing at the present glut of new survival games and bellowing for more, as though engaged in a drinking competition with some kind of cartoon Viking, then rest easy. Gord developers Covenant.dev have announced To The Star, a "whimsical" survival adventure that takes heavy inspiration from Alice In Wonderland, and features a cooking system that lets you combine monster parts with "suppressed emotions", so as to produce both consumable foodstuffs and weapons.

I love the idea of cosy living, which is why it was that Tiny Living update that dragged me back into The Sims 4 for a few years there. The issue of course, is that in real life, if forced to live in a space the size of the interior of a camper van, I would pile things on every surface within about 12 hours. Chaos would reign. I would hate it. But I don't hate the idea of it, which is why i enjoy things like Outbound, which is a game about living in a camper van.

A mobile version of hit survival horror Lethal Company has popped up on the iPhone App Store and Google Play — but isn't what it seems. The game's developer Zeekerss has warned players this is «likely a scam of some sort», and not made with its permission.

Graham has been bandying Abiotic Factor around the Treehouse as "Half-Life designed for co-op survival japes", which is obviously a noteworthy combination of words, so let's have a look at the Steam page, trailer, and gosh, there's a demo here too. That's Friday night sorted.

Back in 2022, Blizzard announced that they were working on a survival game set in an "all-new universe". Not much more was known about the game except that the studio were actively ramping up recruitment, seemingly after having been working on the project since 2017.

A fan-made VR mod for Lethal Company is out now, so you can fully immerse yourself in your work for the Company.

Core Engage and Daedalic Entertainment have released a new overview trailer for New Cycle, their post-apocalyptic "dieselpunk" city management game. "New Cycle" is obviously a bit of a self-contradiction, and I suspect that's deliberate - one of the questions the video leaves you with is whether there is "a future beyond survival", or whether we are doomed to just repeat the processes of extraction and gradual building-up, resource overexploitation and encroaching disaster suggested by these 12 jam-packed minutes of in-game footage.

Developer Core Engage and publisher Daedalic Entertainment have shared a gameplay overview of upcoming city builder New Cycle ahead of its release into early access next week.

I'm pretty sure I've written about this somewhere already - I may have expressed it to a therapist - but when I was a lad, I had a recurring nightmare about a place called Snake World. It was a fizzing neon labyrinth that was both home to various evil snakes and sort of made of snakes in probably-Freudian ways.

It is said that for every human being in existence there is a dedicated species of job simulator, a variety of job sim that speaks to that person, body and soul. In my case, that job sim is Medieval Machines Builder, probably better known as Siege Weapon Builder.

Video games love spiders but arachnophobes obviously don't, and we've seen an increasing number of studios attempting to find a comfortable middle ground — usually an adorable, blobby middle ground — for all involved in recent times. Enter developer Zeekerss, which has now taken its own delightfully literal approach to solving the ongoing spider problem in its smash-hit co-op horror Lethal Company.

Viral Steam hit Lethal Company is no stranger to mixing the scary with the slapstick, as anyone who’s been dispatched with a ladder to the head or eaten by a fire exit knows. The co-op scrap scavenging game’s absurd humour might just have peaked though, thanks to one of the funniest additions I’ve ever seen in a PC game.

Lethal Company - the game in which you exit a dropship, enter an abandoned factory, pick up exactly one (1) piece of salvage, and are immediately eaten by something made entirely of teeth - is getting a VR mod. Created by DaXcess and rodabafilms, it will surely only make life more oppressive for people deserted by their co-op buddies and left to fend off giant spiders with a shovel, not that I'd know what that's like.

Let's get this out of the way first: KnifePlayground: Horror Battle Royale is an absolutely terrible name for game. You might as well call Halo "GunMap: Alien Crowd Control", or Baldur's Gate 3 "TownDungeon: Party Enhancement Simulator". But the project beneath the moniker has something to it. Announced just today and created by small Brazilian team MadMozer, it's a first-person, multiplayer-focussed, Unreal Engine deathgame that traps you in a randomly generated mansion with a bunch of archetypal horror movie munsters - demon clowns, cursed puppets, toothy ghouls and hooded axe-murderers.

Back in September, Dave the Diver studio Mintrocket unveiled Nakwon: Last Paradise, a 16-player stealth-survival extraction game set on the streets of Seoul amid an undead apocalypse, and now — with a public pre-alpha playtest looming — it's shared 22 minutes of gameplay.