There's always Factorio. It never goes on sale, but you can easily rack up over a thousand hours - and then discover the modding community.
Also recently released on Steam is Satisfactory, which is Factorio but in first person with more focus on base design and exploration instead of tower defense since Satisfactory has infinite resources and no overarching alien threat, so efficiency and throughput are more important than combat.
so with the steam summer sale going on I've been looking to get some new games to wait out covid with, does anyone have any suggestions for what to get? I've been looking into that ARK game and it seems like it could be fun
EDIT: so after doing some more research and finding out that the ARk is a buggy mess I've kind of given up on that. the idea of making my own little castle and crafting my way to the top is still rather interesting tho. does anyone know of a good game that can scratch that sort of itch? cause right now the two biggest contenders are Minecraft and Conan exiles.
As someone with over 1600 hours in ARK since very early access I feel I must defend one of my favorite games.
It does have bugs, but rarely are they game-breaking in and of themselves. Where they are a problem is also where the vast majority of the complaints about the game come from, the Official Servers. An un-moderated mess where bug exploiting and being the biggest asshole to ruin everyone elses fun is the only way to really play because it's nearly impossible to play at all if you don't because everyone else is. The official rates are also an extreme problem, where breeding is slow as all hell(a Gigantosaurus, the largest carnivore takes literally two real life weeks to grow from egg to adult, requiring care, food, and attention the entire time or it will starve to death), gathering is only slightly less tedious, and on top of that when you log out your character simply goes unconscious and the world continues to run while you are offline so you have a rather significant chance off logging on to find yourself dead, your base looted to bedrock, and all your dinos you worked so hard to get are dead.
However, all of these problems are beyond simply to avoid. Never play on the official servers. With an unofficial server, either rented or a private world you host on your own comp for yourself, moderation is up to whoever owns it and the rates are what they decide they will be.
Don't feel like waiting for breeding? Whatever, it's a few numbers in the config file to change the Giga from 13 days and 18 hours to 10 minutes from egg to baby.
Gathering is too much of a chore and resources are too heavy? A couple numbers in the config and a mod to adjust weight values and you get 100 stone per hit with a basic stone hatchet that weighs 0.001 lb per item.
Don't like a change the devs did? Usually within an hour of unpopular changes there is a mod to reverse the change.
Want a different map but don't want to pay for the DLCs? There are so many mod maps it's not even funny, hell Ragnarok, Valguero, and Crystal Isles are all now official DLC's for free that were originally mods.
Mods alone are why you want the game on Steam. You are only one click from a complete change in the game, and before logging in I would suggest subscribing to either Super Structures or Structures Plus(aka, S+), they are massive mods that give so many Quality of Life changes the game is a whole lot more fun. Once you play with them on, you'll never understand how anyone can ever play without them.
It does have problems, but there is no game that gives an experience even close to what ARK does. Even if you play solo and adjust the rates to your liking, I would highly recommend the game. If you want to play with other people, there are hundreds of unofficial servers open to join for an number of ways to play, or if you want to just play with a few friends and people you trust there are services that you can rent a server from for maybe $15/month for a 10 person server.
Really the main problem the game has is the official servers. If you avoid those, it really is a enjoyable experience about building up from nothing, taming dinosaurs to ride and fight with, and generally taming a primal world for yourself. There's really nothing like it. There are dozens with similar base building mechanics, but for the taming and riding aspect ARK is the top of a very small list.
