Games Like Satisfactory: 12 Factory Builders and Co-Op Worlds Worth Your Next 100 Hours

You didn't search games like Satisfactory to read three paragraphs about how beloved Satisfactory is. So here's the short version. If you want more of that exact feeling, play Foundry — it's the closest thing there is. If you want deeper, more ruthless automation, play Factorio. And if the group is just done with factories and wants the next thing, skip down to the co-op section, because half of what I'm about to recommend isn't a factory game at all.

What this list does that the others don't: every single entry tells you whether you can actually host it, what it costs, and — if you're already running your Satisfactory server — how to switch without paying for a second one. Some of these are ours. Half of them aren't, and I'll say so plainly, because a recommendation you can't trust is worth nothing.

The closest thing to Satisfactory: Foundry

Let's not bury the best pick at number seven like every other list does. Foundry is the answer to this question. Full stop.

It's first-person. It's built on conveyors and machines feeding machines. It runs on the same "just one more production line and then I'll log off" loop that ate your last three hundred hours. If you handed Satisfactory to someone and said "make it voxel-based," you'd get something very close to Foundry.

The differences are where it gets interesting. The whole world is voxel terrain, which means you dig through it — tunnel out an ore vein, carve a shelf into a cliff for your smelters, drop a factory into a hole you made yourself. Satisfactory builds on top of the landscape; Foundry lets you rearrange it. The early game is tighter and a little less hand-holdy, which some people love and some people bounce off — worth knowing before you buy.

And as of the Rails & Reactors update in April 2026, it finally has trains. That's the big one. Long-distance logistics, a proper train-mapping system, the whole reason your late-game Satisfactory saves quietly turned into a rail network — it's here now, plus modular reactor buildings for when your power draw gets silly. The trains are what push Foundry from "smaller cousin" to "genuine Satisfactory alternative."

Foundry: same conveyor-and-machine loop as Satisfactory, first-person, built into voxel terrain you can dig straight through.

Hosting it: yes, from $16/mo, and our built-in Foundry Mod Loader handles Steam Workshop mods without you ever touching SFTP — zip them, upload once, done. Already on a Satisfactory server? GameSwap moves you across to Foundry server hosting in about ten minutes and keeps your factory frozen for whenever you want it back.

If you want deeper automation: Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, and Shapez 2

This is the "I don't want more of the same view, I want more complexity" bucket. If Satisfactory's spaghetti stopped scaring you, these three will fix that — it's the natural home for anyone searching games like Satisfactory and Factorio in the same breath.

Factorio is the benchmark the entire genre measures itself against. Top-down, 2D, and completely ruthless about logistics — belts, inserters, trains, circuit networks, and a blueprint system so good the rest of the genre is still catching up to it. The biters mean you can't just ignore defense while you optimize, which keeps you honest. If Foundry is the comfortable next step, Factorio is the one that makes you better at the whole idea of automation.

Factorio: the top-down benchmark. Ruthless logistics, the best blueprint system in the genre, and something out there in the dark that wants your factory gone.

Hosting it: yes, and it's the cheapest dedicated server on this whole list at $8/mo. Grab Factorio server hosting, hand your group the blueprint string, and let the factory run while everyone's asleep.

Dyson Sphere Program takes the scale question and answers it with an entire solar system. You're not building a factory, you're building an interstellar power grid that eventually wraps a star in panels. It is genuinely stunning and it will eat a month of your life. Here's the honest part: it's single-player. There's nothing to host, and I'd rather tell you that than invent a reason to sell you something.

Hosting it: nothing to host — Dyson Sphere Program is single-player only.

Shapez 2 is the genre stripped to its skeleton — no combat, no survival, no resource anxiety, just pure shape-processing logistics at a scale that gets genuinely absurd. If the only part of Satisfactory you liked was designing the perfect balanced production line, this is that part and nothing else.

Hosting it: not one of ours — Shapez 2 is a solo puzzle-box.

Burn through those and Mindustry, Techtonica, The Riftbreaker, and Oddsparks all live in the same neighborhood — tower-defense automation, underground factory-building, action-RPG-with-a-base, and conveyor-belt logistics with a fantasy coat of paint, respectively. Keep half an eye on StarRupture and Hydroneer too if you want the survival-plus-factory hybrid that's still finding its feet.

The one nobody suggests: modded Minecraft

Every list has Factorio on it. Almost none of them tell you the obvious thing: you probably already own a factory game and haven't noticed.

Minecraft, with the right modpack, is a 200-hour automation game hiding inside a game that's already sitting in your library. Create turns it into a gorgeous, physics-driven contraption builder — rotating shafts, mechanical arms, assembly lines that actually move parts around. GregTech is the deep end: multi-block machines, real chemistry, tech trees that make Satisfactory's milestones look casual. And the old Tekkit lineage is still the friendliest on-ramp for a group that wants to automate without reading a wiki for a week first.

The pitch is simple. You (probably) already own Minecraft. A tech modpack turns it into hundreds of hours of factory-building for the price of the mods, which is nothing.

A Tekkit farm I built years back — machines working the crops, conduits carting everything off to storage. This is Minecraft, technically.

Hosting it: yes, from $10/mo, and this is where our Modpack Manager earns its keep. CurseForge, Modrinth, FTB, Technic, and Voidswrath are all searchable straight from the panel — pick a pack and it installs the pack, chooses the right Java version automatically, and sorts the server config, with no hand-uploading a zip over SFTP. Not sure which plan a heavy pack needs? Our Minecraft server calculator tells you how much RAM you'll need before you spend a cent, then Minecraft server hosting has you building in minutes.

What to play after Satisfactory when the group wants something different

Here's the thing nobody selling you a factory game wants to admit: sometimes the answer to "what to play after Satisfactory" isn't another factory game at all. Sometimes the group is just done. The pipes are optimized, the space elevator's fed, and everyone wants to do something with their hands that isn't balancing a manifold. That's fine. That's most of the reason we built the swap feature I'll get to in a minute.

Palworld scratches the automation itch in a completely different shape. You catch pals, and the pals actually work — they run your base, craft, mine, haul, and farm while you're off doing something else. It's the same "set up a system and watch it run" dopamine, except the system is made of adorable creatures and a labor policy you shouldn't examine too closely. It's also a genuinely good co-op game, which a Satisfactory group is already primed for.

Palworld with the same crew you built factories with — the pals run the base while you handle the boss that just wandered in.

Hosting it: yes, from $16/mo. Palworld server hosting keeps your base and your pals working around the clock, not just when the host is awake — which, for a base-automation game, is the entire point.

Enshrouded is the building-and-survival pick with real construction depth. Less automation, more exploring a big handcrafted world and carving a genuinely impressive base out of it. If your group liked the building in Satisfactory more than the logistics, this is the pivot — and we host Enshrouded too, from $16/mo.

Vintage Story is the slow burn — about the closest thing there is to "Minecraft for adults." Punishing early game, deep and unhurried progression, a survival loop that respects your patience and your intelligence in equal measure. It's a mood, and when it's the right mood there's nothing else like it. Vintage Story runs from $8/mo.

Valheim is the reliable one. When the group can't agree on anything, someone says "Valheim?" and suddenly everyone's in. Viking survival, satisfying building, boss fights that force you to actually cooperate. It's the default group pick for a reason, and Valheim is $16/mo on our end.

Sons of the Forest is for when the group wants tension instead of optimisation. Up to eight of you crash on an island full of cannibals and worse, build a base, and try to survive the night — and the building has real depth, with a weirdly capable AI companion hauling logs while you wall the place in. Hosting it: yes, from $13/mo — Sons of the Forest keeps the island and your half-finished treehouse fort persistent between sessions.

Abiotic Factor is co-op crafting-survival played dead straight inside a secret research facility, with a genuinely funny streak. Picture Half-Life's Black Mesa if you had to scavenge parts, craft your own gear, and rig up base defences against whatever just crawled out of the anomaly — the same "build a working system in a hostile place" itch, minus the belts. Hosting it: yes — it's in the GameSwap catalog, ready to drop onto any server with the room for it, so the lab keeps running between shifts.

Timberborn is beavers doing hydro-engineering: damming rivers, stacking vertical districts, and routing water through brutal drought cycles with a logistics brain far closer to a factory game than "cute animal city-builder" lets on. If you liked planning Satisfactory's layouts more than defending them, this is a lovely, low-stress home for that instinct. Hosting it: nothing to host — Timberborn is single-player, so treat it as the solo palate-cleanser between group sessions.

A few more worth knowing, one honest clause each: Astroneer for gentle, colorful planetary building; Subnautica and The Planet Crafter for solo-leaning survival with a terraforming hook; No Man's Sky if you want the whole galaxy and don't mind it being a mile wide and an inch deep in places; Oxygen Not Included and RimWorld for colony sims that reward the exact same systems-thinking; and Stardew Valley for when everyone just needs to farm and calm down for a while.

The quick version, in a table

Skimmed all that? Fair. Here's every one of these games similar to Satisfactory on one screen. "Automation depth" is how much of the game is systems-building; "we host it" is exactly what it says.

Can you play these with the same group without buying a second server?

Yes — and this is the part no games site can tell you, because they don't run the servers. We do. Satisfactory, Factorio, and Foundry are three of the games we host most, and keeping factory-heads happy is a big part of why we sit at 4.6 on Trustpilot. So take this as the host's answer, not a blogger's.

It's called GameSwap, and it lives right in the Nitro panel on every EVLBOX game server. Say your group's on Satisfactory and wants to try Foundry for a weekend. You open GameSwap, pick Foundry from the catalog, and choose to freeze your Satisfactory world instead of wiping it. Freezing archives the whole thing — saves, world, mods, configs, all of it — into a freeze slot stored off your server, using zero of your disk. Then it installs the new game. When the group's ready to go back, you hit Restore and your factory comes back exactly as you left it, right down to the mods and settings.

GameSwap, mid-swap from a live Satisfactory server. Freeze what you've got, install something else, Restore it later exactly as it was.

It's free on every game server, and your first freeze slot is included. Most swaps finish in about 5 to 20 minutes depending on how big your world is. The honest fine print: on the free tier there's a cooldown between swaps, so it's built for "let's play something else for a while," not flipping games twice an hour. Want several worlds parked at once with no waiting? Extra freeze slots are $5/mo. The GameSwap guide has the exact cooldowns and the rest of the details.

One server. One bill. Whatever you're all playing this week.

Frequently asked questions

What game is most like Satisfactory? Foundry. It's first-person, voxel-based, built on the same conveyor-and-machine factory building, and as of its April 2026 Rails & Reactors update it has trains — which is what pushes it from "similar" to genuinely the closest thing.

Is there a multiplayer game like Satisfactory? Several. Foundry, Factorio, and modded Minecraft all support co-op, and all three run on a dedicated server, so the factory keeps ticking over when you log off. That last part is the difference between playing together once and building the same base for three months.

What should I play after finishing Satisfactory? Depends what you're after. Want more automation? Factorio or Foundry. Want a change of pace with the same group? Palworld, Valheim, or Enshrouded. The list above splits along exactly that line so you can pick your camp.

Do I need a dedicated server for these games? Honest answer: no. Most of them support peer hosting, where one player's machine runs the game. A dedicated server matters when you want the world running while you're offline — which, for a long factory save everyone dips into at different hours, is basically all the time.

Can I switch my server from Satisfactory to one of these? Yes, with GameSwap — it's free on every EVLBOX game server, most swaps are done in 5 to 20 minutes, and your Satisfactory save stays frozen and ready for whenever you come back to it.

Whichever one you land on, the whole point of this list is that you're not stuck with it. The pipes will still be there. Your Satisfactory save isn't going anywhere — it's frozen, safe, waiting. Pick something off the games list, swap into it this afternoon, and see if it sticks. If it doesn't, the factory's one Restore away. The next hundred hours can start today.