After over a decade in early access, the hit zombie survival game 7 Days to Diehas finally finished development, releasing in July 2024 on PC and consoles. It’s been a long and arduous journey, with dozens of new updates and releases from developer The Fun Pimps over the years.
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In the time since 7 Days to Die’s initial early access debut, a huge selection of survival-sandbox games from indie and triple-A developers alike have hit the market, with 7 Days to Dieheavily influencing many of them. For those of us that have been playing for years, or just picked up the game for the first time, here are some of the best games that you may play if you’re looking for more 7 Days to Die-style gaming.
10No Man’s Sky
Intergalactic base-building… now with friends!
No Man’s Skyis infamous for its disappointing day-one release, with multiple pieces of promised content and mechanics missing from the $60 game at launch. But now, over 7 years later, No Man’s Sky haswon back the respectof players with a massive number of content updates, patches, and free expansions to make good on their ambitious promises.
Base-building, crafting, and exploration are huge core aspects of gameplay in No Man’s Sky, as well as the ability to play with friends and other random players. Extensive combat and RPG systems have also made their way into the game’s ecosystem, proving No Man’s Skyto be one of the biggest sandbox experiences on the market.
Survive the apocalypse on the open seas
Whether alone or with friends, Raftstands out as one of the leaders in the survival-crafting space, ditching the procedurally generated terrain commonly found in the genre for a vast ocean full of pre-designed landmarks to explore. Collecting materials and building your own custom base are still at the forefront, of course, but this time your base travels the world with you, floating through the Waterworld-like apocalypse.
Players can enter parties of up to eight people in full co-op compatibility, or play in solo matches, all the while searching to solve the mystery of this strange new world. While you won’t find any zombies or PvP in this title, nature still has plenty of hostile enemies to throw your way in Raft.
Seriously, watch out for sharks.
8Abiotic Factor
Bring your friends, this is a scary one
It’s a little bit Lethal Company, a little bit SCP: Containment Breach, and a whole lot of survival-crafting goodness. Abiotic Factorbrings 1-6 players down into a high-tech GATE laboratory complex, tasking them with surviving and escaping after an extremely disastrous containment breach of its many anomalous research subjects.
Swapping zombies for supernatural entities, Abiotic Factor takes a cosmic horror approach that blends sci-fi, terror, and a bit of goofiness perfectly. There’s also a unique class system in the game based around choosing your PhD subject (you are all scientists, after all) that adds a great layer of synergy to co-op play.
Old-School Runescape meets God of War: Ragnarok
Valheimis a highly-acclaimed, Norse mythology-inspired survival-crafter with a heavy focus on base-building and boss battles. Players can form groups of up to ten people to survive the procedurally-generated wilderness together, fighting off animals and mythological beasts alike while trying to stay alive.
Vikings and survival sandbox is a combination that we’re surprised hasn’t been tapped into sooner, and Valheimexecutes both aspects perfectly. While it is still in early access, that hasn’t stopped Valheim from remaining one of the most-played games on Steam on a daily basis since its release in 2021.
A cute exterior with dense and dark roots
If you’ve spent all this time thinking thatTerrariais “just 2D Minecraft”, you are sorely mistaken. Terrariatakes a deep (and we meanreally deep)dive into RPG elements and dungeon-crawling, featuring hundreds of unique items, weapons, enemies, and bosses to encounter in each world.
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Base-building and traversal are obviously made a bit simpler with the removal of a third dimension, but also allows the game to embrace the aspect of vertical exploration, letting players explore high in the skies and deep below the ground. It’s easy to pick up and simple on the exterior, but as you keep progressing through this pixelated survival-crafting game, you’ll begin to realize just how vast the world truly is.
5Dysmantle
Destroy everything!!
A hidden gem in the densely-populated survival-crafting space, Dysmantleis a sandbox game that stands out due to its ability for players to destroy any object they come across. With the right tools, you can dismantle and harvest materials from basics like trees, vines, and trash cans, to even the most structurally-intact objects like metal doors, brick walls, and military tanks.
Dysmantlefeatures a detailed overworld to explore, filled with dungeons, loot, recipes, and (of course) zombies to battle. Completionists will especially love this game, as with enough grinding and progression, you can begin to halt the soulslike respawning of enemies in each area of the map, clearing out the abandoned island you inhabit.
Put your PvP skills to the test
Debuting at nearly the same time as 7 Days to Die was Rust, the multiplayer sandbox survival game that swapped zombies for truly unforgiving PvP and combat elements. Starting literally naked, players have to compete or cooperate with each other to survive (with many choosing the former), starting with sticks and rocks and working their way up to automatic weapons and vehicles.
Rustis a unique title in the space because of its 24/7 server system, forcing players to fend for themselves when online and then find ways to protect their own items when they log off. It’s a true free-for-all in the world of Rust, and the choice to trust other players is as tempting as the choice to betray them and steal everything.
3Minecraft
Did you really think we weren’t going to mention it?
That’s right, we put TerrariaandMinecrafton this list, and for a good reason. Simply put, 7 Days to Die would not exist if it weren’t for the truly massive influence that Minecraft had on the sandbox genre, not to mention gaming as a whole. To this day, Minecraftremains one of the purest and most-polished survival-crafting experiences of all time.
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While the highly-active fanbase or cute pixel graphics might scare you off, make no mistake: Minecraftis legitimately fun for all ages. Incredibly dense programming, building, engineering, andRPG systemslie beneath the game’s 16-bit exterior, with players making some truly impressive builds (and we haven’t even gotten started on the mods yet).
2The Forest
Basically LOST: The Game
Crash-landing on an island full of strange enemies and secrets to discover, players ofThe Forestwill soon realize that this is one of the survival-crafting genre’s absolute finest titles. With a fascinating story to dive into, as well as extremely satisfying survival and base-building mechanics, The Forest is a must-play for fans of the sandbox and survival genres.
We highly recommend playing with friends on this one, as we had a blast exploring spooky caves, fighting ravenous cannibals, and building our dream forts with our fellow players.
For every wacky toy or gameplay mechanic there is to play with (for example, building giant slides to surf turtle shells down), there is an equal amount of tense and moody atmosphere to pull you right back in to the immersive world of The Forest.
1State Of Decay
TheState of Decayseries is one of the few zombie sandbox games that properly integrates settlement management into the fold, giving players the ability to switch between survivors at will while sending out groups on runs and missions with actual rewards. Everything you want in a zombie game is here: driveable vehicles, intelligent companions, open-world exploration, satisfying weapons, and even strategic decision-making.
With athird entryinto the series on the way (at the time of this writing), and multiple hefty DLC expansions in both of the first two installments, the State of Decay franchise will last you weeks of gameplay on end. The ambition of the developers at Undead Labs is matched only by their creativity, pushing the boundaries in the zombie survival space with each new update they release.
