Games like Stardew Valley to sink into next

Games like Stardew Valley to sink into next

Stardew Valley's gentle loop of farming, foraging and befriending the whole town is hard to replace once it has its hooks in you. These four games chase that same one-more-day feeling, whether you crave crafting, building, survival or just a touch of cosy chaos to fill your evenings.

• Terraria is endless sandbox crafting: dig, build, farm and fight across an enormous, randomly generated 2D world. If Stardew's mining, tool upgrades and steady progression hooked you, this goes far, far deeper, with hundreds of hours of content to unearth.
• Don't Starve Together keeps the gathering and crafting at its heart but adds a wonderfully tense survival edge and a striking hand-drawn Gothic charm. It's demanding, funny and absolutely shines with a friend along for the ride.
• Raft takes the build-and-gather loop out to the open sea, where you expand a floating home plank by plank while hooking debris, fishing and foraging to stay alive. It's relaxed co-op survival with just enough peril to keep you hooked.
• The Sims™ 3 scratches the social and life-management itch that Stardew only hints at, letting you build homes, shape careers and relationships, and cheerfully lose whole evenings to the small rhythms of everyday life.

If unwinding is the goal, our roundup of the cosiest relaxing games has more picks, and several titles here double as brilliant games to play with your partner. Every game's page lists the current price and all-time low across stores, so compare them and check our deals to grab one near its all-time low.