Craft The World

I’ve spent over 600 hours in this game. Not because it’s groundbreaking or filled with story twists or gorgeous graphics. But because it showed up for me when life didn’t.
I played Craft The World mostly during the worst parts of my life—when I was unemployed, when COVID hit, when everything felt fragile. This game never asked much from me. Just... build a base, dig deep, collect some resources, and prepare for the next monster wave. That’s it. Simple loops. Comforting loops.
There’s no real story. The goal is to eventually craft a portal to the next world. I think I’ve done that ten times now. Sometimes I’d mod the hell out of it—so much that I’d break the game completely and have to start over. But that was part of the ritual too. Break. Rebuild. Continue.
It was the game I played so I could keep going in real life. When things were too heavy out here, I’d go in there, move little dwarves around, and let that be enough.
And then... I stopped. I came back years later, loaded it up, and something had changed. The game was the same. I wasn’t.
Now I have money. I have a warm bed. I have people. And somehow, I find myself drawn to heavier stories—games that deal with grief, identity, morality. The weight I no longer carry in real life, I now explore in fiction.
Craft The World isn’t less fun. I’ve just moved beyond needing its kind of peace.
But I’ll always be grateful for it. It was my quiet companion through the chaos.
Thank you, little dwarves. You helped me hold on.

Craft the World is a game that I have played on and off over the years. It's a very fun game but I never can play it for extended amounts of time because it can become very frustrating. I will later get into more detail why that is the case, for now let me tell you about what this game is about.
In Craft the World you take control of a tribe of dwarves that use portals to colonize new worlds. You play in such a world and build a thriving dwarven colony. The world is made out of blocks which you can tell your dwarves to dig out for you. Blocks take longer to dig depending on the material it is made of, with dirt and sand being super fast while stone and ore takes longer. Removed blocks are carried by your dwarvces to their stockpile where you can use them to craft various tools and structures. You also can hunt down animals and chop trees for food and extra materials. Dwarves can carry equipment, so you want to start out by crafting pickaxes and axes to speed up the gathering process. You also need weapons, starting with a simple wooden club, to defend yourself against dangerous enemies that can spawn at night or in the underground.
Dwarves can have various skills, each one starts with one random skill but can learn up to three. These skills level over time and speed up tasks like cutting trees, mining or crafting items. Combat skills on the other hand increase damage. In order to learn these skills you need to give your dwarve a skill book that randomly drops from blocks you mine. These skill books also increase the experience of a skill if the dwarve knows it already.
YOur dwarves have of course personal needs. They need food and a bed to sleep. You need to build a shelter by placing a totem inside an enclosed space. The totem will create an area that stops enemies from spawning and allows dwarves to heal by sleeping inside a bed. The totem also shows the quality of the shelter which speeds up the sleeping process of dwarves. Higher quality can be achieved by having more decorations or better building materials for your shelter.
Besides directing your dwarves by giving orders you also can cast various spells that you unlock as you progress through the game. These spells can be something simple like placing an artificial light to something more offensive like launching a fireball. Spells cost mana however that you regenerate over time and the costs for spells increase the further away you are from your shelter.
Everything you do will earn you experience and every time you level up your mana limit increases and you get a new dwarve. More dwarves means more productivity but also another citizen to please. A large colony will also attract attention. After enough time has passed, a monster portal will open at night which spawns many enemies that attack your shelter. These attacks can be difficult but also lucrative since monsters drop valuable loot like materials and more importantly, coins. Coins can be used at a shop to buy materials, tools, whatever you need. It's great way to further improve your colony.
This game has a very huge technology tree. To unlock new technologies you simply have to craft structures, refined materials and tools from the technology before it. It's a simple concept that allows you to progress naturally.
You can play as long as you want but each world also ha s awin condition that you can achieve if you desire. The game has a hidden portal somewhere in the underground, you have to find it, beat kill the guardian and then find the recipes of the portal parts that are hidden through the world. Once you assemble the portal you can use it to leave the world, unlocking the next world type. Doing this the first time will also permanetely unlock a trophy decoration for syour settlement.
The different world types offer various new challenges for players to overcome. The first world is easy to get into with weaker enemies and fewer monster spawns. The ice world has snow and ice instead of water, so you need to melt the ice to generate your own water. The desert has sand storms that can deal damage and destroy blocks and also has pyramids that have dungeons to explore.
The game has a lot of content to offer, more so if you have some of the DLCs which add new items and new worlds to explore.
But let's talk about some of the frustrating parts. This game has an infamously bad AI. This has been improved over the years and honestly, it is much better as it used to be, but it still makes many mistakes. Dwarves don't always pick the fastest route to travel or the best dwarve for the job but this isn't as bad as the combat AI. Dwarves will run into fights and almost die, run out of the fight and then run back into it. This can lead to frustrating moments in which a dwarve dies because he couldn't value his own life. On the other hand you have dwarves with full live and a high cvombat skill that run away because they are frightened. It makes no sense why some are suicidal while others don't attempt to fight. But one of the worst things in the game is when you order an attack on an enemy. Suddenly ALL dwraves drop all their items and run to the enemy like some rabid dogs no matter hwere they are on the map. The dwarves that are the furthest away won't even reach the target before it dies and then they slowly waddle back to pick up the items they dropped. It's so annoying that dwraves drop all their pockets before heading into fights, just take it with you.
Speaking of items, the storage management is anightmare. Dwarves have only ONE dedicated storage during the majority of the game. This storage is at the spawn point of your dwarves (the portal) anmd since you cannot move it you have to build your settlement around it. If that storage is in a bad spot, tough luck, make it work! All the chests in the tech tree are just decorative, apparently dwarves like to look at boxes but they don't like to put things into them. You can buy a new storage from the merchant or wait until a very late game tech that allows you to build extra storages. The good thing about these at least is that they all share the same storage but until you unlock these you will have a wait a long time for dwarves to deliver goods to your storage.
Another annoying aspect is the grind. All blocks drop onlöy one material. Ore block? One ore. Coal? One coal. This means you have to mine an absurd amount of blocks if you want to produce in a meaningful quantity. Combined with the fact that you need to produce stuff to unlock more tech, you realize how much more materials you actually need. It's never enough! This kinda fits into the "greedy dwarves" stereotype but from agameplay perspective it just takes too long.
Then there are sapwning rules. Objects and creatures spawn at random. The game makes sure that there is always a minimum amount of objects in the game world but this can be frustrating if you try to mine or build. Objects on top of a block will block your ability to mine it or build on it, so you have to remove it. Combined with the long walking times to and from the storage you have asituation in which you give an order, a dwarvbe walks to the storage to get the required object, then reaches his destination just for a tree to have spawned on top of it, blocking whatever you wanted to do.
But despite all of that, there is a reason I always come back to the game. The game devs are still active even after more than ten years. They still put out updates with new content, some free, some paid DLC. They add new quality of life imrpovements, recently they added a merchant that allows you to sell items for gold coins. They try really hard for a game that doesn't have the same reach as Dwarf Fortress or Terraria. And whenever I see a new update I jump back in the game and play for several weeks. The game is just fun, even if the dwarves are dorks that don't know how to survive on their own.

Even after so many years, still getting updates and still a superb game

Yea, It's a pretty good Craft to Survive type game. Venture out, chop and dig, return to base, fortify and defend.

Interesting game, but too many additions, and it's a shame when pumped-up gnomes die.

Hidden Gem not many people know about.

In this game you manage a colony of dwarves, ordering them to collect resources, build a base and fight waves of monsters that come periodically.
These types of games can be super satisfying and suprisingly engaging, but they often struggle with being too complex or technical. This game fixes that issue, with pretty approachable and simple controls and mechanics.

If you want to chill for an hour or two building a sick castle, commanding an army to fight monsters and sending them to the caves to mine, this is your game!

Though it is complete B.S that you gotta buy A D.L.C for Multiplayer (wtf?).

I like the game. What I DONT like is that the dwarves don't protect their base! Maybe instead "Costumes", Fix the fact that the dwarves don't protect their base unless I click on attack. Maybe fix the portal, they will not use it. That has been going on for a year already. I have completed the tree countless times yet I can't get them to use that portal to go to the next stage. I love this game, been playing it for a few years now. I would love to see it fixed and working correctly.