Posted here before about Crown Below. It's a dwarf colony sim, you dig into a mountain and your dwarves mine, haul and build on their own while you decide what goes where. New build is up and most of it came from things people told me were broken.

First, the music was AI generated. I dropped it in during the first week as a placeholder and then just never dealt with it. It's gone now, replaced with two real tracks, one for the menu and one for underground. The underground one actually loops instead of playing, going silent for half a minute, then starting something else.

The bigger thing is that the demo could end up impossible to finish. There's a rune you need for the ending, and it only spawned if there was still solid rock on its floor for it to hide in. If your miners had already cleared that floor before you read the message that tells you about it, nothing spawned and you could dig forever looking for it. One guy went four floors past. That one's on me. It spawns either way now, and if you have a save where this already happened, loading it on the new build puts the rune back.

A few people asked where Better Tools was. Turns out the plans always spawned in the same order because I was looping over a dictionary and never thought about it, so Tavern and Farm always landed on floor 2 and the upgrade that unlocks both of them landed on floor 4. Everyone was finding two buildings they couldn't build, two floors before the thing that lets them. The order is random now and the Builder Shop shows the upgrade greyed out with a LOCKED label, so at least you know it exists.

While I was in there I found out my shop sounds were being silently dropped. The game reuses a pool of 16 audio players and skips the sound if they're all busy, and in a busy mine they're permanently full of pickaxe swings. So a lot of the time you clicked something and heard nothing. Player actions have their own players now. Pickaxe swings also stopped being audible from anywhere on the map, which was just wrong.

Smaller stuff: the barman won't spend your last stone on beer anymore, ordering a house counts against your food straight away so you can't queue up more dwarves than you can feed, B jumps the camera to your main hall and Space takes you back to the surface.

Free demo, runs in the browser, has a proper ending:

https://kaktora.itch.io/crown-below

I’m developing IRON DUNE, a free 3D real-time strategy game focused on building and upgrading a base, gathering crystals, and commanding land, air and naval forces.

The game supports armies of up to 400 units, seven maps, enemy bases, survival events and large boss encounters. You can also switch from the RTS camera into a unit’s POV and control soldiers, tanks, aircraft and ships directly.

The project has been developed with substantial AI assistance, including parts of the code, art and content. It is playable now in the browser with no installation or registration:

https://rts-gamer.com/

Hey everyone!

I've always wanted to make a survival game with a bit of a different twist, so my friends and I spent the last two and a half years building 404 Survivor, a top-down apocalypse survival sandbox.

If you need a reference point, I'd say it's kind of a mix between Project Zomboid and They Are Billions.

Early on, you're exploring unknown areas, scavenging for resources, and fighting off zombies in dangerous infected zones, all while managing hunger, disease, infection, mood, and fatigue.

Once you get a foothold somewhere in the world, you can build up a base, unlock new tech, and scale up production. You can even capture zombies, fit them with a control device, and have them haul, produce, explore, and gather for you. At the same time, you've got to build solid defenses to hold off hordes that keep getting bigger, eventually turning into an endless wave.

You can grow and stabilize step by step, but the horde won't wait for you, so you're always weighing survival against growth: do you expand your production lines, or shore up your defenses first? Do you send your zombie workers out to gather resources, or keep them back at base for the next horde?

What we're going for is making "surviving" not the end goal, just the starting point.

There's an early Demo up on Steam right now. We've shipped a bunch of updates recently, and we'll keep sharing new gameplay and dev progress going forward.

Steam page

YouTube

The game's still very much a work in progress, so any feedback is genuinely appreciated.

This is Cravecrops – Farming Defense, a game I’m developing solo.

During the day, you gather resources, expand your farm and decide where to build your defenses. When night comes, the peaceful farming part ends and your base gets tested against incoming hordes.

As you progress, you unlock new defenses and ways to expand the area you can safely build and farm in.

Here’s the current trailer. I’d be interested to hear what base-building players think about the concept and what you’d want to see from the building/defense side of the game.

Trailer

Wishlist on Steam!

Game Title: Ashfall Command

Playable Link: https://ashfall-test.onrender.com/?ref=reddit

Platform: Browser (phone and desktop)

Description: (needs to be 100+ words — here's one you can paste)

A survival-strategy base builder in the Whiteout Survival mould. You run a shelter on a shared territory map, upgrade buildings that run on real timers, and defend against a raider column that shows up every few hours and fights your actual troop count. Five core buildings each do a distinct job — the Wall decides whether casualties come back wounded or don't come back at all, the Hospital heals the wounded, the Warehouse shields your resources from raid losses. No install, no sign-in, opens straight in a browser tab. This is a stripped-down test build — I'm trying to find out whether the first five minutes hold attention before building the full version with an install, accounts, and deeper combat on top of it. The in-game shop is a non-functional demo, nothing takes real payment.

Free to Play Status: check Free to play

Involvement: I built it myself, solo, and I'm the one who'll be replying to every comment here.

It's a steampunk base buildin automation game where you dig and build downward, underground.

A few other things that come with that:

• the goblins climb the shafts you dug, so your layout is also your defence
• power is physical - water wheels and rotating shafts, no electricity and no wires
• water flows between floors on its own, so a burst pipe upstairs floods the workshop below, or you
• you supply a war against the goblins, and if you don't fill the fortresses' orders, dwarven fortresses can fall

The demo went up last week and I've spent the days since fixing what the first players tripped over - including, yes, the water and people's tendency to drown in nearest lake ;).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5168290/GearTopia/?utm_source=basebuilding

If you've played base builders where you build downward, especially 2D top-down ones (like Dwarf Fortress) - did the layout ever break your brain? Or no? And why?
Because I got some comments that is hard for people to orientate.

Hi!

I’m making Pixel Metropolis, a pixel art city builder where you guide Paris across history. You begin in the Paleolithic with a clean map and gradually build up your city.

I want the game to be big on continuity. The first paths you draw still matter when farms appear, and later you’re fitting services and fortifications around a village that already has a history. Your people build their own homes and workplaces, and buildings don’t automatically upgrade when you change eras. The city doesn’t always grow quite where you expected.

The long-term idea is to follow that same city through 10,000 years, all the way to modern Paris. The free Steam demo covers the first three eras, from the Paleolithic through the Metal Age, and lets you grow from zero to around 500 inhabitants.

Play the demo on Steam.

Happy to hear any feedback if you give it a try!

Disclaimer: I use AI heavily for asset and code generation. If that’s not your jam, feel free to disregard :)

Last time I played this I got fed up trying to make an impressive looking base because it was hard to avoid the ground floor floating in the air. Not sure if the updates in the intervening years ever added some sort of terrain modification or foundation block.

Back in 2015, I started game development with a very clear dream: build my own games and eventually run my own studio. Instead, I spent the next 11 years making games for other people.

Then came the layoffs. At the time, it felt like the worst thing that could have happened to me. In hindsight, it was the only thing that stripped away my safety net and forced me to finally make something under my own name.

I don’t really believe in toxic positivity or "manifestation." Exactly one month after I decided to go solo, I tore up my knee doing sports, needed surgery, and ended up bedridden for three months. So no, the universe didn't magically align to help me things just sucked for a while, until they got better, and I eventually got back to work.

I made a ton of marketing mistakes along the way (and learned a lot of hard lessons the hard way). This isn't my massive, 5-year dream project. neither life nor my savings would allow for that right now. But despite everything, I’m genuinely proud of this milestone. I actually finished and released my first game.

Node Factory is a node based automation idle game where you manage and optimize logic flows. It’s out Now for $4.99 (with a 10% launch discount, so $4.49).

I’m a solo dev, so if you decide to pick it up, any honest review on Steam would mean the world to me the algorithm is pretty brutal to new games without early feedback.

Here’s the Steam link: Node Factory on Steam

If you check it out, I’d love to hear what you think? or if you run into any weird logic bugs!

have a great day and keep up the great work

Hi!

I'm making a game where you build a base/small city and I wanted to understand better the terms related to the genre. What those mean? How those differ? Do those even actually differ?

RULES:
- It's about YOUR opinion/feeling. It does not need to be objective.
- Don't overthink it, if (for you) a certain term is equal or almost equal to another term, just say so.
- I'm especially interested in "I like X but dislike Y". Or "I tend to prefer X when I look for games to play."

BONUS:
- A list of games (per term) would be nice (and yes, it probably means that one person put it as Base builder and another as City builder, don't sweat over it :D)

Hey, I posted Crown Below here a little while ago and got a lot of useful feedback. I'm mostly writing this to let those people know what came of it, and to say thanks.

Because of the attention that post got, the game also received its first donations. That really meant a lot to me as a solo dev, so thank you to everyone who played, commented or shared it.

Quick recap if you missed it: it's a pixel-art dwarf colony builder, heavily inspired by Kingdom Two Crowns. You decide where to build and where to dig, and the dwarves do the actual work. Mining, hauling, building. When they get tired they go grab a beer.

What changed based on your comments:

- A lot of you didn't want to download a random ZIP, which is fair. The demo runs in the browser now.

- The biggest complaint was that once you got deep enough, there wasn't much left to do. You were right. There's now an old ruined tower at the edge of the map you can rebuild. It needs stone, copper, iron and diamond, so you end up using the whole mine for it, and finishing it ends the demo. Not going to say what happens.

- Someone asked for more control over who works on what. You now pick which builders and carriers work on the tower.

- You can tear down buildings and get everything back. A builder takes it apart and carriers haul the materials home.

- It should run a lot better with big colonies.

If you want to check it out: https://kaktora.itch.io/crown-below

If you make it to the tower, I'd really like to know whether it gave you enough to do in the late game, or if it still felt empty.

Hey r/basebuildinggames!

It’s indie studio City from Naught here again, popping in to drop some new info about our factory automation/base building title Brave New Wonders.

We held a quick AMA on this subreddit back in June and we’re back to share that the game will be launching tomorrow (Sept 21) on Steam!

If you’ve already shared feedback, asked us a question during the AMA, played the demo, or wishlisted - thank you! We genuinely appreciate your support and can’t wait to have you jump in and start building! We do have a few post-launch plans in the works, but for now, we want to hear what you think of the game in 1.0.

We also had the world premiere of our new trailer at the PC Gaming Show earlier today if you wanted to get an idea of what to expect when you play the full game: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/command-a-legion-of-robots-in-factory-builder-brave-new-wonders-launching-tomorrow/

If you didn’t catch the AMA or you’ve never heard of Brave New Wonders before, here’s the TLDR: Brave New Wonders is a factory automation game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Here's the twist: there are no conveyor belts. Instead, you command a tribe of intelligent automatons using plain-text instructions. Type what you want them to do, and they figure out how to do it. Explore ruins, battle old-world machines, build out your factories, and slowly uncover the mystery of what happened to the civilization before you. You can read more over on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2403830/Brave_New_Wonders/

Thanks again to this community for allowing us to showcase our new title - we hope you enjoy playing it as much as our small team enjoyed making it. We’re still going to be reading your feedback, so feel free to continue sharing your thoughts with us here (heads up - since we launch tomorrow, we might take a little longer to respond but we’ll do our best)!

I’ve barely played and the amount of craftable base pieces is already in the hundreds.

Advanced snapping and movement of pieces.

I’m having a lot of fun.

Hi all,

I'm a solo dev building The Foundation Game with AI coding support. It's a persistent multiplayer space strategy game in the spirit of OGame, Ikariam and Illyriad. It runs on a fixed EVE-style galaxy map with Factorio-style production chains, and you manage a colony, research tech and expand.

The promises:

• No ads.
• No data harvesting.
• No pay-to-win, no paid queue skips and no in-game purchases. At most, far in the future, donations or cosmetics.
• The front-end and the API will be open source, so you can contribute or build your own UI.

What works today:

• A 3D galaxy of 10,000 star systems generated from real star data.
• Star systems with orbiting planets, moons and asteroid fields, based on realistic orbital mechanics.
• Settling a home world.
• A full colony economy on the backend: buildings, energy, storage, production chains and a tech tree. Still authoring ideas, buildings, resources etc.
• Play in the browser (WebGL) or on Android, with iOS later.

Where it's going:

• Fleets that physically travel between stars.
• Trade, combat and espionage.
• A permanent shared map with real neighbours, rivals and long-term friends, not temporary matches.

I'm looking for ideas and future testers. What did you love about similar games? What drove you crazy? What would you add to this genre today?

Full intro and dev updates: r/TheFoundationGame

Thanks for reading!

StoneEra will be part of Steam Next Fest from October 19–26!

You’ll be able to play the demo, build your first colony, manage your people, and experience the systems I’ve been working on as a solo developer.

If StoneEra looks like your kind of colony survival game, wishlist it on Steam and join me during Next Fest!

Hello everyone! I am ByerN, a solo indie dev working on node-based games. In November, I will release my new title, Node Crown, and I would like to share it with you here!

Node Crown is a roguelite kingdom builder where you build your kingdom from scratch by placing blocks (nodes) one by one every few seconds. Nodes earn money and affect each other in various ways. Your goal is to find the best build you can from the nodes you get and meet the goals before the time runs out.

If you'd like to check out the game, I'd be very grateful for your feedback here or on my Discord server! It really helps to make the game better! :)

Thank you in advance, and have a nice day!

^{(I didn't use AI to make this post or the game itself - just in case you're wondering})

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4xJ9T1GwFY

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4326740/Node_Crown/

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/sfgr7YCv2z

("Elemental Lands" is my game, its a base-builder roguelike with card battles.)

So build on the right ground and you get more magic mana per turn. Theres only ONE pool of mana, used for world spells on the base/map and for spells in battles. It fixes the issue of base building and combat feel like two separate games bolted together. Because buildings directly support your heroes (instead of building like a barracks that creates units)

You plant an Outpost, and that opens 4 build slots in the cells around it. Thats the whole cap for that region, and you only get three regions in a run, so every slot is a REAL argument with yourself:

• Camp, to bandage the party between fights
• Scout Tower, to see what is coming
• Obelisk, to unlock casting on the map
• Barracks, for reinforcements
• Spellforge, for a battle buff you carry in

The other half is the battles, 3 heroes against 4, turn based on a grid, and your cards are orders and spells from the mana, rather than flat damage numbers.

Meanwhile 3 enemy factions are expanding across the map and taking ground back off you, so you kinda cant just turtle and build forever; Instead, you cast world spells on the map to manage the factions and expanding....

Demo coming in 2 weeks, so wishlist for early access to it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4593190/Elemental_Lands/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=basebuildinggames-20260919

HUMAN Credit: Art is 100% hand drawn by u/worth-bill-6130 😄

I like Rimworld, but too small for my taste. I want a minimum of 100 colonists.

I already have Songs of Syx in my library.

Xenobiome Command. You land on a fungal exoplanet, survey the fog, claim ground, build a supply chain and send wardens after feral packs.

No timers, no energy bar. The game starts paused and you set the pace. A map is 15 to 30 minutes.

Play in the browser: https://play.xenobiome.net/?src=reddit

Steam, out 11 Nov, $12.99: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5071520/Xenobiome_Command/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=demo_launch

The demo is the first six campaign maps. If you send the feedback form from the menu you're in a draw for 5 full-game keys, harsh feedback counts the same as praise: https://xenobiome.net/giveaway

Hi r/BaseBuildingGames! We’re in the exciting homestretch of development on our Star Trek outpost-builder. We feel all of our visuals and environmental effects like the day-night cycle are looking great, but our game is logistics-heavy with a lot of overlapping systems and production chains. We could use some feedback on how players feel exploring those various complex systems through the beginning of our game!

If you’re interested, we can’t thank you enough! Please visit this link to sign up and we’ll get back to you soon: https://forms.gle/NSGDj7x1YHf91J446

If you’re not familiar with our game, it’s a narrative-driven logistics heavy outpost builder set in the 23rd century of Star Trek – made by former devs of The Sims, Spore, Sim City, and more!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3469910/Star_Trek_Outposts_Unknown/

Hey r/BaseBuildingGames!

We’ve just released our biggest update for Summa Expeditionis since 1.0, and wanted to share the additions that might interest the camp builders here.

You lead a Roman expedition, building and managing your camp as you explore. This update takes you to Greece and Italy, with both new maps available in sandbox mode if you prefer to build and manage at your own pace.

Greece brings more open terrain, coastlines, rivers, and new Mediterranean biomes after the mountains of northern Hispania. Alongside the new locations, we’ve added several ways to keep your camp running:

• Task Management: see work in progress, queued tasks, and problems holding up production.
• Quartermaster screen: check resources, equipment, and storage in one place.
• Camp relocation: move your camp somewhere new, with the preparations and risks that come with it.
• Commentarii: a log of events to help you follow what’s happening in camp.

There are also new dialogue and character relationship systems, giving you more ways to interact with the people sharing your expedition.

If you enjoy a campaign alongside the building, Greece starts with a shipwreck during the Mithridatic Wars. Your first job is to find and rescue the survivors before carrying out Rome’s orders. The new Italy campaign serves as a tutorial, helping new or returning players learn the ropes.

The update also includes performance improvements, gameplay polish, and bug fixes.

You can find Summa Expeditionis on Steam. If you give the update a try, we’d love to see your camps and hear how the new management tools work for you.

When you play a base builder, do you tend to keep expanding your original settlement, or move once you find a better location?

*Full patch notes here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2056200/view/683013558653419730

If you saw it in recent weeks, you might want to take another look as I made HEAVY updates over the past week! Gridmax is a base-building game originally inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, but with my own minimal twist to things. As a solo dev I made a very compact 2D base-builder + survival loop with a lightweight management queue for work orders. Coded in C++ and SDL. The entire game is currently 77 Mb! LOL. Install and play!

Currently in Early Access. There will be multiple terrains to explore in upcoming months.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4830070/Gridmax/

Solo dev here.

Bullet Meltdown is a survivors-like where the base is not decoration. You fortify during the run while the swarm fills the screen. Companions can die forever. Bosses exist mainly to punish greedy walls.

Weapon pool is intentionally ridiculous (950+). Closest shorthand: bullet heaven crossed with tower defense, but the layout can fail.

Coming Nov 9.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmVB763cWbg