It was a good year for survival crafting sickos, and I'll be playing some of these well into 2026

I am the survival crafting menace of my friend group-the person in Discord always suggesting we go play in a new sandbox when we haven't even finished building castles in the last. It's like being friends with a sentient Steam Discover, but for some reason I can only recommend games where we're each given a Barbie and a pile of Legos. (Image credit: Iron Gate) (Image credit: Mainframe) (Image credit: Ytopia) (Image credit: Facepunch) (Image credit: Keen Games) (Image credit: Deep Field Games) This year didn't leave me with a lack of things to talk about, either. If anything, it was almost too busy for even the most enthusiastic of survival crafting sickos. I spent months bouncing between my sandstorm-battered home in Dune: Awakening, then bug-infested dwellings in Grounded 2, and cobbled-together cubicles of Abiotic Factor. It's just, well, I really love the thrill of collecting giant piles of junk. Then there's nothing quite like the satisfaction of taking all that junk and turning it into things. And if you give me a monotonous little chore to do on the side? That's just icing on the cake. It's an unfortunate way to be when most games checking those boxes have no clear end, though it does explain why I've got a growing list of survival crafting playgrounds I'm taking with me into 2026. Valheim - Call to Arms update (Image credit: Iron Gate) Valheim's Call to Arms update didn't make much of a first impression when distilled down to the barest of patch notes, so I almost passed on it. I'd just wrapped up another regular session with friends in March, and after so much viking survival earlier in the year, my group wasn't ready for a return trip when the update dropped in September. It was just on a whim, one rare, free weekend, that I did something I never do, and booted up the survival crafting game by myself. And man, am I ever glad I did. Valheim's 2025 changes were bigger than I thought; filled with visual upgrades, revamped combat mechanics, and even a new equipable item type with the addition of trinkets. I was so giddy with discovery that I didn't even bother loading up my usual spread of Valheim cheats to shortcut through the more familiar sights. Instead, I went adventuring the way god intended: mostly naked, sailing on a boat of questionable integrity, and wielding nothing but a spear and handful of berries. Pax Dei - 1.0 (Image credit: Mainframe) Pax Dei speaks to my old MMO-loving soul. It's a grindy, player-driven world with limited transportation options and alot of brutal journeys hoofin' it across the map. I'm not even optimistic that there's enough demand to keep its dreamy vision of a massive, early 2000s-era RPG alive-none of us have the time or attention span for that-but despite feeling that every time I roam sparsely populated zones while rubberbanding gracefully after an injured boar, I keep logging back in. The player-driven economy stuff doesn't...

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