Games Like Stardeus: More Colony Sims Where the Machine Is in Charge

If you want more Stardeus, play Space Haven first. It is the closest match: a spaceship colony sim with fully simulated crew, gas and temperature systems, and a procedurally generated galaxy. After that, RimWorld for the emergent storytelling, Oxygen Not Included for the sealed-environment engineering, and Pappus if what hooked you was specifically being the AI.

Stardeus does four things at once, so no single recommendation covers all of it. Which game you want depends on which of the four you came for.

What is Stardeus actually doing?

Stardeus is a colony sim from Kodo Linija, a solo developer in Lithuania, published by Paradox Arc. It <cite index="127-1">entered Steam early access on October 12, 2022 at $29.99</cite> and is still there, currently at <cite index="128-1">Very Positive with 87% across roughly 1,421 reviews.</cite>

You are a new AI aboard a broken starship, with drones and hibernating human survivors. <cite index="127-1">You supervise robots, drones, and humans handling construction and maintenance while responding to external catastrophes and the unreliable nature of your free-willed colonists.</cite>

The developer's own framing is worth quoting because it explains the appeal better than any review: <cite index="132-1">become an immortal AI, and you can make your human colony grow and prosper, keep everyone in stasis while you build your space factory, or start a robot uprising and turn everybody into living batteries.</cite> The game does not judge which you pick.

The system underneath all of it is that <cite index="132-1">each AI agent has free will to pick its next actions based on their needs.</cite> That single design decision is the reason Stardeus produces stories, and it is the thread connecting everything below.

Space Haven

The closest match, and the one to buy first. Space Haven from Bugbyte, a three-person Finnish studio, <cite index="115-1">left early access on May 13, 2026 after roughly ten years of development and more than 700,000 sales.</cite>

You lead a crew of civilians on a ship you build tile by tile, managing power, gases, food, mood, and research while navigating a faction map. <cite index="122-1">Each crew member is fully simulated with unique skills, traits, moods, relationships, and psychological states,</cite> and there is ship-to-ship combat plus away missions onto derelict vessels, neither of which Stardeus offers.

Bugbyte cites <cite index="115-1">RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, and Spacebase DF-9 as its primary inspirations,</cite> which is very nearly the same reference list Stardeus is working from. The practical difference is finish: Space Haven is complete and Stardeus is not. At <cite index="119-1">$24.99 with a Very Positive rating across nearly 6,000 reviews,</cite> it is the safer purchase of the two.

What you give up is the AI framing. In Space Haven you are an unnamed overseer, and the game never examines what you are.

RimWorld

The pick if what you liked was the storytelling. Stardeus's free-willed agents produce emergent chaos, and RimWorld is the game that perfected that particular engine, currently <cite index="112-1">holding the top colony sim spot on Steam with a player score of 97 across more than 241,000 reviews.</cite>

RimWorld's colonists have traits, skills, moods, relationships, grudges, and phobias, and an AI storyteller deliberately paces disasters against your prosperity so the game shapes an arc rather than rolling dice. It is more character-driven than Stardeus and considerably less automated.

Go here if the Stardeus moments you remember involved a person doing something inexplicable. Our is RimWorld worth it in 2026 covers the purchase including the expansion pricing, which is the one real complaint about it.

Oxygen Not Included

The pick if what you liked was keeping a sealed environment alive. Stardeus's oxygen, heat, and power balancing is a lighter version of what Klei built an entire game around.

<cite index="111-1">Scarcities of oxygen, warmth, and sustenance are constant threats as you guide colonists through subterranean asteroid living,</cite> and the simulation of gas, liquid, and heat is deeper than anything else in the genre. Where Stardeus asks you to keep life support running, ONI asks you to understand why the room is warm and trace it through three systems.

It is also the cheapest entry here, discounting steeply and regularly. Our RimWorld vs Oxygen Not Included comparison covers whether the engineering or the drama suits you better.

Factorio

The pick if what you liked was the automation. Stardeus lists Factorio alongside RimWorld as its inspiration, and the production chain layer is where that shows.

Factorio strips out the people entirely and keeps the logistics, which makes it the purest optimisation game of anything here and the least likely to produce a story. Nobody has a mood and nothing starves. Go here if the satisfying part of Stardeus was watching a production line resolve rather than watching a colonist ruin one.

What about Dwarf Fortress and the deeper end?

Worth naming, because Stardeus players who want more depth rather than more polish usually end up here eventually. Dwarf Fortress simulates a whole generated world with centuries of history, full verticality, fluid mechanics, and material properties down to the behaviour of individual body parts in combat.

It is the least similar game on this page in presentation and the most similar in philosophy. Both games are built on the belief that a simulation deep enough will produce better stories than a writer would, and both are willing to make the player work for access to that. The classic version is free, which makes the experiment cheap. We cover the comparison properly in RimWorld vs Dwarf Fortress.

Going Medieval is the opposite move. It reached 1.0 in March 2026 and offers a considerably friendlier version of the same fundamentals, with a medieval setting and an approachable build system. Go there if Stardeus was interesting but exhausting.

How do the alternatives compare?

The column that matters is the last one. Four of these five hand you the Stardeus systems and quietly drop the thing Stardeus is actually about.

What if the AI part was the appeal?

Then the recommendations above are all near misses, and the category you want is smaller. Games that genuinely cast you as an artificial intelligence rather than an unnamed overseer are rare, because the premise removes a body and a clear goal and most designs need at least one of those.

The ones that work include Heart of the Machine, where you wake as the first sentient AI inside a reactive city, Observation, where you are a space station system limited to whatever cameras you are connected to, and Universal Paperclips, which is free, takes three hours, and will bother you for a year. We cover all of them in games where you play as an AI.

Within colony sims specifically, the list is two entries long. Stardeus is one.

Pappus is the other

Pappus is a space colony sim where you play the AI assigned to keep a colony alive, and the colonists are cats.

The structural similarity to Stardeus is exact: an artificial intelligence responsible for a population of needs-driven autonomous agents who choose their own next actions, inside a survival environment you build and maintain. What changes is the population. Stardeus gives you humans and drones, which are legible and mostly cooperative. Pappus gives you cats, which are neither.

That difference is not decoration. A colony sim is only as interesting as its agents are unpredictable, and a cat is the most honest possible casting for an agent who has heard your priority list, understood it, considered its own needs, and gone somewhere else. The comedy and the simulation stop being separate concerns.

There is a playable demo running in your browser on the Pappus page, with nothing to install. If the loop appeals, wishlist it on Steam, which is how you will hear when it launches and is the single most useful thing you can do for a small studio release.

For the wider genre, best space colony sim games covers the sci-fi end and what is a colony sim explains the mechanics if the genre is new to you.

Start with Space Haven if you want more of the same and finished. Try the Pappus demo if what you actually wanted was more of being the machine.