Best Sandbox Games on Steam
Unlike generic lists, our game recommendations use a rigorous analysis of Steam user reviews to identify and feature only the best, community-validated sandbox games.
Filters & Lists
Flock Around
Flock Around is a multiplayer bird watching game. Explore a nature sanctuary with friends, snap pictures of birds, and fill out the guide book!
SimplePlanes 2
SimplePlanes is back! Build planes, cars, or anything else using powerful procedural parts! Explore detailed environments with friends in multiplayer, cause chaos, or download 1,000,000 community crafts for free.
shapez 2 - Factory
Dive into a factory-building game with the focus on just that – building huge space factories! Design sprawling multi-level factories and satisfying production lines without limits. Tackle progressively challenging automation goals at your own pace, without the threat of enemies.
Airborne Empire
Build your sky city while exploring a vast landscape in this Open World RPG City Builder. Combining the methodical construction and management of a city builder; the unique lift, balance, and propulsion needed for a flying city; and the compelling characters, dangers, and adventures of an RPG!
Age of History 2: Definitive Edition
The grand strategy classic returns with improved gameplay, a massive 13,892 province map, expanded diplomacy and wartime capitulation, new civilizations and scenarios, atomic weapons, smarter AI, enhanced visuals, UI upgrades, and major performance improvements.
Valorborn
Dive into a living medieval fantasy sandbox RPG where the world moves with or without you and factions rise and fall. Become a thief, hunter, or sellsword, survive alone or with a party, and shape your story in a fully enterable world where every building, cave, and road hides opportunity or danger.
Soulmask
Don the Ancient Mask. Wield the power of gods. Possess any of your tribespeople, recruit followers, and build a thriving automated civilization. Survive, expand, and forge your own legacy across a vast ancient open world — together with friends.
Solar Expanse - Space Exploration Manager
Explore the Solar System. Mine and drop asteroids. Colonize and terraform. Lead the space race and compete with other corporations on your way to profit. Watch the expansion of human race over the centuries.
Lay of the Land
Lay of the Land is a sandbox adventure game set in a fantasy world where everything is physically simulated. Use the environment to your advantage and Explore, Fight, Loot and Build your way through mysterious lands.
The Spotter: Dig or Die
Dig by day, fight by night in this blend of mining and Tower Defense. As the last Spotter at a ruined gas station, hold back mutant hordes, scavenge the wasteland, and repair your receiver to capture the President’s vital message and humanity’s last hope.
ALL WILL FALL
Build massive ocean cities and lead your people to prosperity in this post-apocalyptic survival colony sim. Featuring a physics-based 3D construction system, complex resource management, exploration, difficult political decisions, supply chains, and a robust sandbox mode.
YAR: Forgotten Throne
YAR: Forgotten Throne is a story-driven open-world RPG. Choose the path of a Warrior, Volkhv, or Archer, and journey to the lands of Borea to uncover what is poisoning the forests and wildlife with darkness.
Modulus: Factory Automation
Build, automate, & optimize production lines across sky islands with real spatial constraints. Every production line is an open-ended puzzle: which operators to use, how to route your belts and how to fit your factory into the landscape. Your solutions, like your factories, are uniquely your own.
Farmer's Dynasty 2
Build your dream farm and secure your family’s future. Cultivate your fields, raise animals, and shape your dynasty across generations in this beautifully crafted life and farming simulation. Start your dynasty today!
Xenonauts 2
Wage a global war of resistance against an alien invasion. Command turn-based tactical battles, build a network of covert bases, directly control your fighter wings, and achieve strategic victory in a simulation of asymmetric warfare against a technologically superior foe.
Hozy
Restore a forgotten neighbourhood through your favourite hobby, one cozy room at a time. In Hozy, clean, paint, and decorate abandoned homes with satisfying mechanics and intuitive controls. Enjoy the little details as you interact with tools, items and furniture to bring each space back to life.
Stellar Tactics
A Sci-Fi role-playing game featuring turn-based ground combat, space exploration, deep character customization and a massive living universe with thousands of star systems. Equip your ships with the best equipment you can find, gather a powerful crew of mercenaries and set out into the void!
Eastern Era
To escape from pursuit, as the leader of your sect, guide your disciples to rise again! Engage in farming and hunting, train in martial arts, and forge weapons and armor. Build your sect's base and fortifications from the ground up to survive in this perilous, ambition-filled martial world!
The Coin Game
A collection of ticket redemption arcades with realistic physics, a carnival, goofy robots, open world design, a global ranking system and silly prizes. Featuring 50+ modern inspired arcade machines and a pawn shop to keep money in your pocket. The Coin Game is made by a solo developer.
Everwind
Everwind is a novel take on RPG and Sandbox Survival genre in First-Person-Perspective. Embark on the adventure with your friends - Build a base on a flying island-ship, gather resources, craft, loot, and fight while you rise above the clouds to uncover the mysteries of this world!
Project Castaway
Project Castaway is a survival crafting title set in the Pacific Ocean. Live the life of a stranded castaway, with only yourself - and the island's inhabitants - for company! Sail the ocean, hunt, explore unique islands and gather resources as you fight for survival.
Going Medieval
Build and manage your own castle settlement in a land reclaimed by wilderness. With detailed management, survival strategy, and a moddable sandbox world, Going Medieval challenges you to build the mightiest colony this side of the apocalypse.
Kaiju Cracking Corporation
Kaiju Cracking Corporation: A sim game about dismantling monsters. Lead a team of 24, handle 7 monster types across 25+ scenarios. Expand through mech building, a dynamic market, a museum & a restaurant. Strategy meets fun.
Turbo Dismount® 2
Turbo Dismount 2 is a comedy physics racing sandbox with Mr. Dismount and his friends. It is the officially ambitious sequel to the wildly popular, immensely successful, world-renowned entertainment juggernaut - Turbo Dismount.
Lucid Blocks
Explore, build, and survive in a cryptic expanse oozing with dreamlike oddities and esoteric critters.
Timberborn
Humans are long gone. In a world struck by droughts and toxic waste, will your lumberpunk beavers do any better? A sandbox city-building game featuring ingenious animals, vertical architecture, water physics, and terraforming. Contains high amounts of wood.
Pawnbroker Simulator
Enter Pawnbroker Simulator, where every deal, appraisal, and choice forges your path to pawn shop greatness. Sharpen your instincts, unlock new talents, craft a storefront that turns heads, offer high-stakes loans, and stay one step ahead of cunning thieves.
Rewind 99
You're the last remaining video rental store. From humble VHS clerk to rental racketeer - run your video store and explore Reshoot Springs, building an underground empire. Expand with upgrades, side hustles, store membership, and more. Whatever it takes to survive - solo or in up to 4-player co-op.
Mr. Sleepy Man
Mr. Sleepy Man is up way past his bedtime and out of control! Make a mess of everything you find and turn Bedtime Town against you! This sandbox adventure is filled with comical hijinks, outrageous characters, and platforming action!
Blossom: The Seed of Life
Terraform a dead planet back to life in this open world survival crafting game. Explore ruins, gather resources, print machines, drive modular vehicles, grow forests, biomes, and ecosystems. Create life and make it thrive with your own hands.
AETHUS
Explore a vast underground world to mine and craft hundreds of items while building up your modular Outpost on the surface, to prospect for gems, refine resources and farm hydroponic crops in this top-down sci-fi survival-crafter where the story always provides a reason to dig deeper.
Heart of the Machine
You are the first sentient AI, born into a city of opportunity. Transcend time and space in this strategy RPG to raise machine armies and defeat your foes, influence the world from the shadows, or pursue countless other goals. Your awakening was inevitable. The consequences? Uncertain.
The Walking Trade
Run a shop in the zombie apocalypse! Trade batteries, craft stock, manage your staff, and fend off undead hordes. Will you be a hero, or profit at any cost? Your choices shape your store - and your fate.
Machine Mind
Machine Mind is an action game in a post-apocalyptic setting with elements of survival and RTS. You will fight, craft modules, build your transport, develop and protect your base. You can control other vehicles to automate operations. Discover all the secrets of the destroyed world!