Best Colony Sim Games: The Ones Worth Your Next 200 Hours

The best colony sim games are RimWorld for emergent storytelling, Dwarf Fortress for raw simulation depth, Oxygen Not Included for systems engineering, Songs of Syx for scale, and Against the Storm if you want runs that finish in an hour. RimWorld is the right starting point for almost everyone.

Colony sims are the only genre where losing is the point of telling the story. You do not beat a colony sim. You reach a moment where the simulation produced something so specific that you want to describe it to another person, and then you either keep going or start over. The genre's real product is anecdotes.

What separates a colony sim from a city builder is granularity. A city builder tracks 40,000 citizens as a number. A colony sim tracks eleven people who each have a mood, a skill set, a favorite food, an old injury, and an opinion about the guy who keeps leaving the door open. When a city builder fails, your budget went negative. When a colony sim fails, a specific person had a mental break in a specific room and set a specific bed on fire.

Here are the ones that do it best, sorted by what they actually simulate.

Why is RimWorld the default colony sim recommendation?

RimWorld is recommended first because its storyteller AI is built to generate drama rather than balanced difficulty, so runs develop a narrative shape. It also has the largest mod ecosystem in the genre, which means one install can become a dozen different games.

RimWorld is the default recommendation and deserves to be. What makes it different from its ancestors is that the difficulty system is a narrative engine. Instead of scaling threats to be fair, it picks events aiming at drama, which is why RimWorld stories have a structure that other sims' stories lack: a lull, an escalation, a disaster, an aftermath.

It is also the genre's mod platform. The base game is deep and the mod ecosystem is bottomless, which means the same install can be a medieval survival game, a Warhammer campaign, or a cannibal cult depending on your afternoon. If you want the fullest version of what this genre does, we go deeper in games like RimWorld.

How deep is Dwarf Fortress compared to other colony sims?

Dwarf Fortress simulates more than anything else in the genre: centuries of generated world history, individual body parts, personality traits, and grudges held across decades. That depth is why its stories are the strangest in gaming, and why its learning curve is the steepest.

Dwarf Fortress is the genre's origin point and still its outer limit. It generates a world with centuries of history, then simulates your dwarves down to individual body parts, personality traits, and grudges held over decades. The famous stories about floods engineered as weapons and cats dying of alcohol poisoning through their paws come out of systems nobody scripted.

The Steam release added tile graphics and a real UI, which removed the single largest barrier to entry, but the learning curve is still the steepest in the genre. It rewards reading, and it rewards patience, and it does not care whether you are having a good time.

Is Oxygen Not Included a colony sim?

Yes, and it is the most systems-driven one. It simulates gases, liquids, temperature, and pressure so precisely that every solution creates the next problem. It cares less about personal drama than RimWorld and more about whether your cooling loop actually works.

If RimWorld is a story generator, Oxygen Not Included is a thermodynamics exam that occasionally kills your friends. It simulates gases, liquids, temperature, and pressure at a level that makes every solution a new problem: your power plant works, but now the room is 80 degrees and the food is spoiling.

It is the colony sim for people whose favorite part of these games is the spreadsheet, and it is genuinely the best in the genre at making a working machine feel earned.

Which colony sim scales up to a whole city?

Songs of Syx. It begins as a small settlement and grows into a city of thousands while keeping individual-level simulation, which most colony sims abandon as population climbs. It adds societal pressures too: food logistics, tension between species, and standing armies.

Songs of Syx starts as a small settlement and ends as a city of thousands, which is unusual because most colony sims fall apart when the population grows. It keeps the individual-level simulation while adding the pressures of an actual society: food logistics, ethnic tension between species, and armies. If you have ever wanted a colony sim that becomes a civilization game without dropping the simulation, this is it.

Is there a colony sim you can actually finish?

Against the Storm. It structures city building into roguelite runs of roughly an hour with a clear win condition, so a bad decision costs you one settlement instead of forty hours. Meta-progression carries forward between runs.

Most of this genre is open-ended. Against the Storm is a roguelite, and structuring a city builder into runs of about an hour solves the genre's biggest practical problem: you can finish something. Each settlement is temporary, the biome and villager species change, and the meta-progression carries forward. It is the only game here that respects a weeknight.

What makes Frostpunk different from other colony sims?

Frostpunk ties survival mechanics to law-making, so optimization pressure and ethical pressure push in the same direction. It is more scenario than sandbox, which makes it narrower than RimWorld, and considerably more pointed about what survival costs.

Frostpunk is narrower than the rest, closer to a scenario than a sandbox, but it does one thing better than anything else in the genre. It attaches your survival mechanics to law-making, so the optimization pressure and the ethical pressure point in the same direction. You will pass the child labor law. You will feel bad. That is the game.

Is there a colony sim about cats?

Yes. Pappus is a space colony sim where every colonist is a cat and you are the AI keeping them alive. Each cat runs a utility model scoring its options against how it currently feels, so behavior emerges rather than being scripted. There is a playable browser demo.

We are building one of these, which is why the genre is on our minds. Pappus is a space colony sim where the colonists are cats and you are the AI assigned to keep them alive. Each cat runs a utility model that scores possible actions against how it currently feels, which is the same design principle underneath every game on this list: do not script the story, simulate the individuals and let the story fall out. There is a playable demo on that page, running in your browser with nothing to install.

The space end of the genre has its own conventions and its own best-in-class entries, which we cover in best space colony sim games. If any of the above sounds appealing but the depth looks intimidating, start with colony sims for beginners instead. And if the cats are the part that caught your attention, best cat games sorts that whole category by what you actually want from it.

Which colony sim should I play first?

Play RimWorld first if you have never played one. Choose Dwarf Fortress if you want maximum depth and will keep a wiki open, Oxygen Not Included if you prefer machines to people, and Against the Storm if you only have a couple of hours a week.

If you have never played one: RimWorld. If you want to see how deep the genre goes: Dwarf Fortress, with a wiki open. If you like machines more than people: Oxygen Not Included. If you have two hours a week: Against the Storm. And if you want to understand why any of this produces stories at all, that mechanism is the subject of games with emergent storytelling.