Somehow the worst part of crafting games is the crafting

GamesSurvival & CraftingSomehow the worst part of crafting games is the craftingWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Iron Gate Studio)

Valheim viking using cooking pot

Survival crafting games have been a dominant force in PC gaming for some 13 odd years. Ever since Minecraft exploded in popularity, we’ve been inundated with games following its early access open world procedurally generated survival crafting sandbox recipe. It’s still one of my favorite genres and I can be counted on to drag my group of friends into every new tree-punching playground. Much as I love them though, the “crafting” is actually the worst part of the survival crafting genre.

When first launched, Minecraft was a novelty. Instead of just stuffing a stack of materials in my pocket and interacting with a shop or merchant to turn them into something new, its visual crafting system was a little puzzle unto itself.

Minecraft(Image credit: Mojang)

Minecraft crafting menu recipe for a diamond sword

From Valheim to Palworld, many crafting games still pulling from those same elements that Minecraft popularized: a procedurally generated world, dropping your inventory when you die, and building arrays of storage chests to hold the many materials you’ve gathered. They all have bad crafting though. All of them.

Valheim(Image credit: Iron Gate Studio)

How to make a Valheim pickaxe

Palworld(Image credit: Pocketpair)

Palworld crafting menu

Once Human(Image credit: Starry Studio)

Once Human crafting menu

Nightingale(Image credit: Inflexion Games)

Nightingale crafting menu

The appeal of building successively more complex tools and gadgets is still there, but crafting games have reduced the act of “crafting” to an interface where there’s nothing for me to actually do. The shopping list is there with greyed-out ingredients and when I come back with everything in hand my reward is this:

It’s boring! It’s not even as fun as those silly kiosks at museums where you can pay a quarter and crank a handle to make a bunch of gears press a penny into a little themed souvenir. That’s a free idea. I’d take a crafting game with a digital crank, truly.

Even Minecraft itself has a recipe book that will auto-fill ingredients for you in a crafting bench these days. I’ll give credit to Sons of The Forest, though—actually crafting things is still ultimately boring but thediegetic inventorydoes make it slightly more interesting than an interface.

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Games like Valheim and Palworld have continued adapting the “survival” part of survival crafting in extremely fun ways. I thoroughly enjoy a great building system, figuring out which foods to eat, and improving gear to survive new climates where I’ve got to fight bigger, scarier monsters. But why must crafting be so drab when it’s got title rights in the genre too?

Kynseed(Image credit: PixelCount Studios)

Kynseed cooking minigame, a player uses a butcher knife to chop lettuce and scrape it into a pot

The best crack at crafting in recent years feels like it’s come from outside the survival crafting genre. Theintensely tactile experienceof crushing ingredients and stirring a cauldron in Potion Craft and the excellent chopping and scraping of cooking inKynseedboth come to mind. Even life sim Palia has a nice set of minigames for cooking, even though its furniture crafting menu looks just like all of those others above.

Not every crafting game needs a deeply simulated crafting activity, but I wish that some would at least attempt to make crafting an axe an interesting task in and of itself, because I am exhausted with crafting menus.

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