Survival games are often best when played with friends. The ability to split up tasks and have somebody to talk to can break past the initial tedium of many games in the genre. Plus it’s just fun to work together as a team and have long chats. Unfortunately your fake AF friends will drop every single survival game in order to go touch grass, or whatever they do instead of banging rocks against trees with me. Here are the top 10 survival games to play all night, mostly without your friends’ accompaniment.
#10 — No Man’s Sky
What No Man’s Sky lacks in traditional survival mechanics, it makes up for in deep, engaging ship building systems and visually impressive alien worlds to explore. None of your friends will play it with you though because the internet told them it sucked seven years ago.
#9 — Satisfactory
You’ll never want to put this game down. It’s more of a factory builder than a survival game, but it scratches the exact same itch in your brain to start from nothing and build an empire. Your friends will give it a try and never play it again as soon as they need to do seventh grade math.
#8 — Grounded
Grounded is a fantastic game, but the steep difficulty curve of several of the bosses and the terrifying spiders can make it hard to recommend to everyone. Its enjoyable combat and unexpectedly deep main story will keep your friends around for a couple weeks, but they’ll rage quit after dying to Broodmother one too many times.
#7 — Valheim
The five biomes and bosses that were available in the game at launch are quite enjoyable. With enough players even the most tedious iron runs will move swiftly. Unfortunately, that tedium is dialed up to 11 with the mistlands, and your friends actually stopped playing a long time ago.
#6 — Sons of the Forest
A very satisfying in-world inventory system and unique log-based building mechanics will keep you coming back to Sons of the Forest. None of your friends will actually want to play this one with you, but that’s okay. Kelvin will always be by your side.
#5 — Don’t Starve Together
The art style is what initially got your friends to play Don’t Starve, but they decided to stick around for a while to see if it was actually possible for them to make meaningful progress.
#4 — 7 Days to Die
With so many options for both melee and ranged combat, it’s easy to sink hundreds of hours into multiple playthroughs. While you’re desperately farming materials by the thousand to build a suitable horde base, your friends will be punching zombies with their bare hands and eating broken glass.
#3 — Minecraft
You actually stopped playing Minecraft years ago, but the one friend that isn’t a gamer wanted to try it out. It’s always fun to relax and build another castle, even if it means babysitting someone still getting used to mouse and keyboard controls.
#2 — Terraria
The modding community has really kept this game alive, but the base game has enough interesting content that your friends will probably want to actually beat it. They’ll only use the minishark though, no matter how much you tell them it isn’t all that good.
#1 — Ark: Survival Ascended
This is the only game your friends will play just as much as you. Probably more, actually. The promise of riding a T. Rex into battle against bosses will keep them going through the slow midgame, and building the dinosaur compound of your dreams will keep you busy for hundreds of hours.
