Top 4 Best Base Building Games On PC In 2022

Base building games allow players to express their creativity better than perhaps any other genre of video games in history. They can keep players occupied for hundreds of hours. In this article, Gurugamer is going to showcase the top 4 best base-building games on PC in 2022.

1. Factorio

Factorio is a game that sneaks up on you. You start out so simple, harvesting some coal and iron, chopping down a tree or two. Then you plonk down a machine that starts mining iron ore for you, and you feed the result into a furnace. You build more machines, then some inserters. More machines, and it becomes easier to link up a few things with conveyor belts.

Four hours later you look down on a factory system so complex you couldn't have designed it; and yet it grew so gradually, so organically, that at no point you feel overwhelmed. You look at the time - maybe ten more minutes; you want to quickly redesign this bit around your assemblers to fit in another conveyor belt. It would speed up the production of green electronic circuits.

Three hours later you realize that you should have been in bed for hours, but you can't stop now - you just build a tank and you really want to try it out on that alien base that has been growing way too much. Factorio is fun. As simple as that.

The big twist on the formula that Factorio brings is that it borrows crafting elements now common in modern mainstream games to make the building less a matter of using money to make money, and more about crafting basic resources into usable items. It just so happens that these items are buildings that you build your factory out of. In essence, you're building a factory-building factory, hence the common mantra "the factory must grow".

2. Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a catastrophe simulator, and pits you, a simple ape with opposable thumbs, against the cruel and ultimately deadly effects of the oncoming global apocalypse.

In Frostpunk, you must balance the needs of what may very well be the last people on earth, with the needs of the generator that keeps your city warm and alive (and that will doom you to failure should you be unable to keep it lit or accidentally make it explode), whilst fighting with the daily struggle to scrape together resources in a frozen apocalypse. If you force your people to work gathering wood, steel and coal in the frozen snow, they will get sick, but building better resource-generating buildings takes time and extra resources you may not have. If your people get too sick, they will get frostbite, forcing you to choose between leaving them sick and bedridden for the rest of their (probably short) lives or leaving them as amputees, who will be unable to work and may eventually commit suicide rather than continue to be a burden in such extreme circumstances.

And herein comes one of the strongest of your few weapons against inevitable doom: Laws. Every day and a half, you can enact a new law to help your people survive. Laws vary from more practical (the option to make soup instead of normal meals to make food go further, the option to force children into child labor, the option to build care homes and prostheses for amputees) to the more spiritual and forceful (will you use law and order to help give people purpose, or will you turn to faith and spirituality?).

3. Rimworld

This game is fantastic if you like to build a colony from the ground up, it's very interactive and you'll always have something to do, be it planning a new room for your base, building up defenses, creating a more reliable food source, or even raiding enemy factions. At first, it's very daunting as there is a lot to get used to, but each new discovery comes with a new way to experience the game, your story is always your own and it'll never be the same as before, lending this game to nigh-infinite replayability, and that's not even considering mods which are abundant, relatively easy to make yourself and very active.

While there is no set story, this game is still both heartbreaking and hilarious. Things can go in any direction - you could have a trader caravan arrive to sell items just as a raid occurs, causing a massive shoot-out between two major groups just outside your base. Afterward, you can mop up all their valuables and turn their corpses into meals and skin, maybe for that human leather hat you've always wanted.

4. Satisfactory

Satisfactory is a well-scaled factory sim. The game lulls you in with the perfect amount of simplicity at the start to make every added bit of complexity make sense on the larger scale of the game. Often factory sims drop you in, teach you a couple of things, then let you get overwhelmed with the scale of the project in front of you. Satisfactory is literally the opposite - the drip-feeding of ever-increasing complexity, depth, and scale make the game much easier to play and enjoy.

It's an open-world factory building/exploration game. There is currently no precise end goal (more on that later), but the overarching objective is to automate gathering of resources and materials production by setting up networks of construction buildings that will allow you to produce materials you will need to unlock more buildings and ever more complicated materials to craft, which will lead to bigger and more complex building networks, and so on. Eventually, you will be forced to expand your factory to really big sizes and transport resources from long distances away to keep up with the demand. It's the same basic formula as games like Factorio, but here it plays out a little bit differently.

The first-person perspective is a terrific choice. Often the top-down/isometric view factory sims seem too remote, too abstract. Being able to actually be on the ground and walking around your factory makes it really rewarding.