Best Sandbox PC Games 2025

Sifting through the best sandbox games on PC can be tricky business due to how many different kinds of games fall under the sandbox umbrella.

There are open-world sandbox games where you investigate a map and encounter other characters and sandbox builder games that focus on gathering resources and crafting.

One thing that every enjoyable sandbox game has in common is player freedom, allowing you to go anywhere and do anything, sometimes even at the very start of the game.

In this list, we’ll highlight the top sandbox games on PC to play in 2025, including the finest sandbox RPGs, sandbox MMOs, and sandbox open-world games.

We’ll be updating this list in the future with new titles, so make sure to check back and let us know if we missed any of your beloved games!

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To get started, our first recommendation is the 2D sandbox RPG Keplerth, which tasks you and your friends with surviving on a hostile alien planet.

After waking from a dormant pod with no sustenance or clothes, players must get to work gathering resources, crafting items, and building a home.

This ensures you’ll be safe from mobs of enemies as well as provide a base of operations to store items and plan out expeditions.

The game features randomly generated maps and dungeons to ensure every session feels distinctive along with different enemy factions, weapon types, and character abilities.

Billed as a Viking-themed survival sandbox, Valheim casts you as one of Odin’s deceased warriors whose soul ends up in the tenth Norse realm.

With this sprawling ancient pool serving as your new home, it’s up to you to take its untapped resources and turn them into weapons, tools, and lodging.

In addition, you’ll have to keep your Viking character well nourished, rested, and safe from enemy raids by crafting defenses and fortified camps across each region.

Among Valheim’s greatest strengths is its refined build system that lets you construct intricate longhouses and furnish them with all sorts of workbenches and deocrations.

RimWorld is another excellent sandbox simulation game with an immense amount of content thanks to its built-in AI storyteller.

The game builds off of the simple yet effective premise of a colony crash-landing on an alien planet ripe with natural resources and challenges.

From there, it’s up to the player to establish a society where their colonists can thrive in the face of natural calamities, dwindling resources, and interpersonal conflict.

Since every NPC has randomly-generated personality characteristics, wishes, desires, and other quirks, conflict and disputes are bound to arise.

Going Medieval sees you attempting to rebuild society in a world where 95% of the global population has fallen victim to rampant plague.

In the wake of society’s ruins, nature has reclaimed most of the land, providing the ideal foundation for a new civilization.

This is where you step in, guiding the few remaining survivors to establish a new home secure from not only disease but also outlaws, barbarians, and religious zealots.

You’ll design, build, and expand your own settlement, going from modest wooden huts to stone castles and subterranean strongholds.

Fans of 2D sandbox survival games will no doubt find something to admire about Core Keeper, an indie game with remarkable pixel art designs.

In it, players set out to explore an underground cavern teeming with mystery and danger using only their mining tools.

The objective of the game is to build a base, gather materials, and craft useful items while discovering new areas, bosses, and shortcuts.

It places a much greater emphasis on online co-op than other titles on this list, allowing up to 8 players to inhabit the same world.

While you’ll find no shortage of theme park sandbox games, Indoorlands is a new entry in the genre that has managed to catch our eye during its Steam Early Access window.

In it, players design unique theme parks in strictly indoor environments that offer full control over placement and presentation.

You can build and customize a wide selection of attractions using different themes with the option to mix and match or focus on a specific aesthetic for your park.

The game also features a management element for ensuring parks are profitable, along with the ability to manually control or ride each attraction.

The Crash Drive games provide a car stunt playground where you can execute astonishing feats with absurdly super-powered vehicles.

Crash Drive 3 is the latest installment and features crossplay multiplayer and free-roam exploration, allowing you to take on challenges throughout a vast open world with several biomes.

There are also contests you can enter, like police and criminals or take the ruler’s hat, that compete with other players for special prizes.

The best part of this game is that your car’s performance improves simply by playing; using nitro boosts increases your boost capacity, driving rapidly raises your top speed, etc.

Black Skylands is a Steam Early Access title that casts you as Captain of a skyship as you explore a top-down vast world comprised of floating islands high up in the clouds.

Gameplay revolves around constructing your vessel and equipping yourself before setting out to battle groups of pirates and monsters to claim territories for yourself.

Along the way, you encounter various resources and crafting materials that allow you to upgrade your weapons, gear, and skyship.

Skylands’ sandbox world also boasts an assortment of random events such as aerial combat encounters and village distress calls, as well as a base-building component.

From building your own criminal empire to becoming the most renowned gardener in all of Willow Creek, Sims 4 covers just about every path in its extraordinarily detailed sandbox.

That’s before covering the extensive suite of building tools and decorative items at players disposal.

As the series has progressed, so too has its romance system, allowing for new game mechanics and opportunities to roleplay as different characters.

On PC, Sims 4 profits from the ability to install mods and tap into your inner imaginative genius.

The fact that Garry’s Mod continues to draw new players despite being more than a decade old proves how truly timeless and well-designed its sandbox tools are.

Do you want to spawn and attach a bunch of arbitrary objects? There’s a way to do that; Want to design your own FPS levels and face off with other players? Gmod has you covered.

Essentially, if there’s a random activity, mini-game, or concept you’ve always wanted to try to create for yourself, Garry’s Mod likely has a tool or game mode for it.

Playgrounds like this are excellent for stretching the boundaries of your creativity, and with the inclusion of internet multiplayer, there’s no knowing what you and your pals can accomplish.

Another sandbox game that never seems to run out of content is Terraria, which combines the finest parts of 2D pixel art, open-world survival crafting, and limitless exploration.

That is, assuming you have the proper gear to protect yourself from the game’s exhaustive number of diverse enemy types and bosses that gate progression to new materials.

Additionally, the world is teeming with hidden areas and concealed items that can be a lot of fun to seek out, though we recommend having a wiki page open to guide you.

If you’re weary of sandbox games that try to hold your hand and prevent you from discovering cool craftable items on your own, then you’re certain to sink hundreds of hours into Terraria.

Speaking of survival sandboxes with steep learning curves, Don’t Starve is sure to hold your attention with its demanding game mechanics and morbid-looking monsters.

In it, you play as a talented scientist who gets targeted by a demon and ends up transported to a mysterious forest teeming with ominous hazards that only get stronger at night.

Stranded with no supplies, you’ll have to learn how to live off the land and guard yourself against the local wildlife for as long as you can.

If you’ve got a friend who’s willing to come along for the journey, we recommend checking out Don’t Starve Together, which adds online multiplayer functionality.

For a less spooky and challenging sandbox experience, consider picking up Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, which lets you create custom battle scenarios using wonky physics.

We suggest you start with the campaign mode, which attempts to recreate wars from throughout history, ranging from medieval battles to contemporary warfare, and the more peculiar.

This serves as the ideal opportunity to answer life’s most pressing questions, such as “what happens when an army of Roman soldiers face off against a dozen wheelbarrows?”

You have the capability to take control of any of your units during the simulation to turn the tide of battle or more likely, make matters significantly worse.

What makes Minecraft such an outstanding sandbox game is the limitless potential of its crafting system.

Whether you’re building a massive fortress to rule as a wizard or a makeshift rollercoaster that all your friends can ride, there’s a recipe for anything you can imagine.

And when you run out of ideas in the conventional version, you can always start experimenting with some of the best mods for Minecraft.

These allow you to visit novel worlds, customize blocks, and craft all sorts of absurd items, including a jetpack.

GTA V presents the largest and boldest experience to date, introducing three new playable characters in its single-player story as well as the ability to create your own in GTA Online.

The game’s sprawling open-world sandbox is comprised of two regions: Los Santos and Blaine County, with both offering an exhaustive amount of side activities.

Whether you’re looking to flip stolen cars, participate in illegal races, or clean out every bank vault, there’s a near-endless number of ways to get into trouble while making money.

The online version of the game is well-maintained with post-launch content and benefits from a multitude of community-made servers, mini-games, and more.

Red Dead Redemption 2 revisits the Western motif of the original Red Dead but from the perspective of Van der Linde gang lieutenant Arthur Morgan.

Arthur and his gang go around robbing stagecoaches and evading the law, but there’s a lot more to see and do throughout the game’s vast open-world spanning five fictitious US states.

You can take your horse for a ride around the countryside, head up to the mountains to hunt exotic animals, get into bar fights, or just take a nice long bubble bath before hitting the hay.

If you ever grow weary of messing with NPCs, you can always switch to Red Dead Online to team up with other cowboys or start an all-out conflict.

No Man’s Sky has come a long way since its contentious 2016 release, which saw the game panned for “less than truthful” marketing on the part of Hello Games Lead Director Sean Murray.

However, the developer has spent the last four years adding player-requested features ranging from base-building to multiplayer and mod support, resulting in a resurgence of popularity.

It also helps that the NMS engine has been redesigned and upgraded over the years, ensuring it runs buttery smooth on just about any machine.

Other refinements such as enhanced procedural generation and broader mission selection have resulted in a much more engaging and varied experience for players.

One of our favorite parts of playing a sandbox game is pushing its systems’ boundaries to see how the world reacts.

A fantastic game to do that in is Teardown, an Early Access Steam title that offers a fully destructible, voxel-based world.

In it, you play as the owner of a construction company that’s fallen on hard times, prompting them to take on increasingly sketchy jobs ranging from car theft to demolishing an entire building.

Each scenario can be approached in many ways depending on your tools of choice, and the game includes a devoted sandbox mode for those that want to play around with unlimited resources without worrying about adversaries.

Hitman 3 is the final entry in IO Interactive’s World of Assassination trilogy and refines its predecessor’s rougher edges for more covert sandbox escapades.

The story builds off of the events of the two prior games, following Agent 47 and his team as they wipe out the leaders of a clandestine world-controlling organization called Providence.

New features such as enduring shortcuts and VR support help streamline and expand the gameplay opportunities at players’ disposal.

It really delivers on the idea of roleplaying as an assassin with levels that offer a multitude of disguises, weapons, and forbidden areas to poke around in.

Space flight sim Kerbal Space Program sees you building and piloting an assortment of aircraft, rockets, rovers, and more with assistance from tiny green aliens known as Kerbals.

Anything you build can be trial-driven in the game’s expansive sandbox, which extends past Earth and into outer space.

Since the goal is to get the Kerbals into space successfully, you’ll find yourself taking to the skies repeatedly only to run out of fuel or make an erroneous turn and end up plummeting to Earth.

Since the KSP engine can replicate real-life orbital maneuvers, you can even use it to train yourself to be a NASA pilot…or just chain together as many rockets as you can. 

Factorio is a resource management game that sees you converting pristine sandboxes into manufacturing paradises.

At first, you’ll have to manually chop trees, mine ores, and craft parts for your machines; however, once you’ve performed enough research to achieve automation, things rapidly ramp up.

As you expand your factories, you’ll encounter new obstacles you had never considered, such as the local wildlife that isn’t too keen on you stripping away their homes.

One of our preferred aspects of Factorio is its progression system, which offers a variety of upgrades to enhance efficiency, unlock solar power, oil refining, and AI for your machines.

Satisfactory is another resource management game like Factorio but places a much greater emphasis on combat and exploration.

In it, you’re tasked with surviving an alien planet by building a self-sustaining network of machines to gather and refine materials for you.

From weapons and tools to structures and vehicles, there are lots of ways to put your refined materials to good use.

Doing so allows you to access new areas in the open world, revealing more creatures, resource types, and opportunities to explore.

Similar to No Man’s Sky, Astroneer offers a colorful space sandbox to explore as you set out to colonize an exotic planet.

The game features a unique crafting system that sees you creating a network of stations and power plants that can tether your character to provide oxygen as you explore the world.

What sets Astroneer apart from other sandbox games is its Terrain Tool, which allows the wielder to mold the environment to their desire.

This has many applications that can benefit traversal, production, and creativity; lastly, Astroneer is continually updated with new explorable planets, cosmetics, hazards, vehicles, and buildable items.

Currently in Early Access on Steam, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the long-anticipated sequel to 2008’s Mount & Blade.

Like the original, Bannerlord is focused on a systems-driven medieval sandbox that lets you role-play as various character archetypes.

Whether you’re interested in becoming a famous jouster, wealthy tradesman, sword-for-hire, thief, or more, there are countless paths to explore.

The game also features a party system and management component that sees you leading armies of hundreds or more into battle.

Rust presents a harsh online survival sandbox where everyone starts off as vulnerable “nakeds,” spawning on a beach with nothing but a single rock in their inventory.

From that point on, it’s up to them to scavenge for supplies, kill wild animals, and build fortresses to guard their precious loot.

Maps are procedurally generated and range from small islands to diverse ecosystems with multiple biomes.

Depending on the environment, you’ll have to deal with hazards like severe or low temperatures and radiation; however, the biggest threat in Rust is other players.