The best farming games like Stardew Valley on PC

The cream of the crop

Image credit: ConcernedApe/Phoenix Labs/Humble Games/Monomi Park/Soda Den

Feature by Alice Bell Former Deputy Editor

Additional contributions by Katharine Castle, and Rachel Watts

Updated on April 19, 2024

Look, we all know that the behemoth that is Stardew Valley isn't going anywhere soon. Heck, it recently got another update. So sure, we'll all be playing it for years to come, but sometimes you want a bit of a switch up - a crop rotation to keep the soil fresh, if you will. To that end, we've got a list of the best farming games like Stardew Valley on PC. Haunted Chocolatier isn't coming for a while, and there are some surprises on the horizon like Moonlight Peaks, but there are a hell of a lot of cute (and not so cute) farming life sim games already out there, and we've picked our favourite from the bunch for this list. Check them out below. From tending a graveyard to learning to be a witch, clearing trash from the ocean to domesticating animals from scratch, there's a Stardewlike for everyone on this list.

Here are our best farming games like Stardew Valley at a glance. To read more have a scroll down and be prepared for .

Ooblets

It’s tough choosing the cutest farming game on this list, but Ooblets’ bubblegum visuals, quirky farming produce, and adorable critters inch it into the number one spot. Farming in Ooblets has the same cycle of planting, watering, and harvesting but what makes it stand out are the quirky crops you can grow. Forget boring parsnips and carrots, how about Pompadoots, Zinookas, and Fartichokes? Each crop is weirder and more wonderful than the last, leaving your plot of land looking like a botanical garden of exotic plants rather than a farm.

Another great thing about the farming in Ooblets is that you can make a self-sustaining farm with the use of your adorable ooblet pals. Building oobcoops and leveling them means your ooblets pals can plant, water, and harvest your crops for you. Incredibly handy. Together with its life-sim elements and the adorable ooblets ready for collecting, we highly recommend it as a farming game to rival Stardew.

My Time At Sandrock

Earlier versions of this list had precursor My Time At Portia in this spot - and it's still definitely worth a play if you want the lush magical forest vibe - but after coming out of early access and some updates and additional content, we're happy to recommend the dustier, wildier westier follow up My Time At Sandrock in it's stead. Though you'll still be setting up a home from scratch, Sandrock has a more ecological edge to it. It's a desert, after all, so there are rules about how many trees you can cut down. It's a delicate ecosytem.

As the frontier town's builder, you'll probably find your time spent more on mining ores and other raw materials to make machines, than it is about growing a juicy lettuce - but that's not to say you can't keep animals or grow crops, because you absolutely can. Plus you have to spend some time wandering the lovely town, built around and under a huge spire of rock, and try to romance a sweetheart. There's so much to do in Sandrock that you're better off deciding what kind of life you want to live and going full bore in that direction, whether that be a carpenter, a miner or a cattlehand. But you can do it all with friends now, too, because Sandrock got a multiplayer update last year.

Slime Rancher

Slime Rancher is one of the best management games on PC right now, and even though its sequel is currently out in early access, it's not quite ready to beat it out its predecessor yet. Instead of growing veggies and milking cows, you're rearing cute, bouncing slimes. There's a bit of carrot sowing involved here and there, but the aim is to fatten up your raucous army of gelatinous blobs and sell their plorts (yes, poop) for as much cash as possible to expand your farm and feed more plorts into the money making machine.

It's a bit more fast-paced than Stardew, as you'll be spending most of your time away from your farm scavenging for resources and more exotic slimes. You'll need to return often, though, as these googly-eyed terrors are constantly getting themselves into scrapes when you're not around - whether it's bouncing out of their respective pens and escaping, or accidentally eating the plorts of other slimes and turning into all-consuming tar monsters. So make no misktake, this is a farming game with a gooey, rebellious centre. Despite its manic tendencies, though, it's still a very approachable farming game that everyone can have a bit of fun with.

Graveyard Keeper

A rather dark take on the Stardew Valley formula, Graveyard Keeper sees you take charge of a medieval cemetery in a strange, fantastical land At first glance, it seems like there's absolutely nothing wrong. Your main job is tending to the graveyard, as the name implies, although your ultimate goal is to escape back to the mundane, normie world you game from. Doing this means working with the many odd locals (the weirdo wizard, the witch, the bishop) so you need to keep an eye on the calendar and check which days these people are back in town to talk to.

As well as keeping the graves nice and clean, you'll be performing autopsies, burying new deados when they arrive on the back of the village donkey cart, and maybe carving off the odd bits of flesh for a cheeky sandwich or five. It's not all just about spending time with the dead, though. You'll also need to fish, grow crops and explore the local dungeons and caves for new resources and alchemic materials. There are several skill trees to get access to new crafting tables, which let you make candles, glass, jewellery, and even paper and ink to make books. And remember: you have to juggle all this while looking after the graveyard. Just watch out for that donkey, though. He'll be unionising and demanding ever more carrots per corpse before you know it.

Farming Simulator 22

One for the agricultural purists, Farming Simulator 22 is all about getting to grips with mother nature in the most accurate and authentic way possible. That means beautifully rendered crops, and equally beautifully rendered farming machinery to go with it, including the swankiest combine harvesters you ever did see. Sure, Farming Sim 23 has come out now, but real crop-heads know that it's not as stable and removes you a bit from the mechanics of harvesting. And that being the case, what's even the point? So stick to Farming Sim 22.

You see, while other farming games on this list are all about creating efficient routines and automating a lot of the farming process, Farming Simulator 22 challenges you to both manage and work the land yourself, from buying the all important seeds, animals and equipment to driving the vehicles and handling all the dirty work. If you want to broaden your farming horizons, you could build a vineyard or olive orchard instead, or downsize to just a humble greenhouse or a couple of heehives. Heck, you can even do a bit of landscaping when you get a spare moment, too, creating hills, ditches, structures, roads and buildings to make everything just so. It might not look quite as cosy and wholesome as Stardew Valley, but these furrows run deep.

Kynseed

This farming RPG from a couple of ex-Lionhead devs (who worked on the Fable series) has many of the hallmarks of a great Stardewlike. Your farm's quite a bit smaller than what you're probably used to in Stardew Valley, but that's partly because you'll be spending most of your time exploring the village's ancient woodlands and immersing yourself in its strange faery myths. Unsurprisingly, it's got a big Fable-esque Albion vibe to it, and that is a very good thing indeed.

What sets Kynseed apart from other farming life sims, though, is the ability for your character to grow old, have children, and then for you assume the role of said offspring. Every action you take and decision you make carries forward to each new generation, slowly creating a lasting family legacy that will follow you through the game. It's a fantastic idea that brings you closer in contact with the land and world around you - as, arguably, every good farmer should be.

Roots Of Pacha

Describing Roots Of Pacha without one crucial bit of context makes it sound like any other kind of Stardewlike. You, playing solo or in co-op, live in a village as part of a community. Here you farm, build, irrigate, grow crops and tend to animals, and generally improve things to contribute to everyone's quality of life. It's top down and 2D, and it's all in cute little pixelart. Lovely stuff. Look at those sunflowers.

That crucial bit of context, though, really changes the game, because Roots Of Pacha is set in the stone age. You've just settled in a new wilderness area and have to discover what we now think of as basic ideas, like domesticating animals, from scratch. You can't grow potatoes without first discovering potatoes as a concept, right? So likewise, you have to figure out how to process and preserve food, start making art, and expand your village with new buildings in a way that really shapes civilisation. It puts a big twist on the genre, while still keeping the basics of the Stardewlike intact. Plus: baby mammoths! What more encouragement do you need?

Autonauts

Autonauts has one goal: achieve a zen-like state of perfect automation in order to colonise and conquer as many strange new planets as you possibly can.When you arrive on your first planet, for instance, you've got to make everything from scratch - and it really means everything, including your army of autonaut bots. The game starts out small, but even simple tasks have surprising depth to them. If you want to make a pie, for example, then you'll need to make sure you've built a mill to ground your wheat into flour, fetched some fresh water from the river, and churned the milk you've, err... milked from your cows to turn it into butter, and that's just to make the pastry! Then you'll need a table to mix the pastry altogether, and for that you'll need to chop down some trees to get logs. And so it goes on.

Autonauts isn't just a farming and crafting game, though - it's also a great introduction to the basics of coding, too, as you'll need to program your autonauts to keep everything ticking over, whether it's harvesting your grain and bringing it to the mill, or digging for clay so you can build a kiln that you can then use to make bricks, and use the bricks to make proper buildings... You get the idea. The best thing about Autonauts, though, is that you can do it all at your own pace.

Story Of Seasons: Pioneers Of Olive Town

Story Of Seasons: Pioneers Of Olive Town came bounding onto Steam in September 2021. An offshoot from the original devs behind the much-loved Harvest Moon series, this entry in Story Of Seasons games is one of the best thanks to its heart-warming story and its rather sweet cows. Seriously, everyone’s favourite part is the happy little cows.

Pioneers Of Olive Town takes the previous entry, Friends of Mineral Town, and builds on it - the concept is the same, but there is a new town, a brand new map and plenty of unfamiliar faces to meet. The game follows a tale as old as time: players move into their grandfather’s old and dilapidated farm, and are immediately thrown into having to fix it up and create a lucrative farming business. To help players along is a charming town filled with shops, amenities, and pleasant patrons. One of the closest games to Stardew Valley, Story Of Seasons is highly recommended for a relaxing and rewarding farming experience.

Coral Island

If you’re finding Stardew’s farming a bit of a grind, Coral Island is a breezier kind of farming sim. You level up fairly quickly in the activities you do and can also unlock percentage chance abilities to help out with the busty work like making your crops grow faster, soil that stays watered overnight and double resources from harvesting. There’s also an incredibly handy fast travel system letting you zip around the island. All this accumulates in a feeling that you’re making more and more progress each day.

Coral Island is a much more approachable farming sim if all the busy work feels overwhelming, and once you’ve found your rhythm it has plenty of Stardew’s activities - growing crops, looking after animals, exploring mines, getting to know the locals, there are even spirits giving you bundles - it’s all familiar territory, but in luscious 3D and influenced by island cultures. Coral Island also has an admirable eco theming, with a large story strand being about cleaning up the ocean. You're incentivised because the trash you collect when diving is actually a super useful crafting resource. It really brings the idea of living in harmony with nature into a key part of the game itself.

Wylde Flowers

Wylde Flowers hits some of the story beats you might expect. Move to a rural town, helping an elderly relative, etc. and so on. The difference with Tara is that she's also learning to become a witch, just a thing you can be in Fairhaven. During the day you can live your ideal cottagecore lifestyle, growing and harvesting plants, crafting cute furniture, going shopping to get an equally cute outfit. You know, stuff rural people do all the time!

But you also get to become a witch, i.e. fly a broomstick, cast spells, and the ol' favourite of turning into a cat. One extremely cool thing is that you can learn to control the weather, which is a real boon for crop growing, and while you can absolutely decide to romance someone, we're not sure why you'd bother when you're too busy being a cool witch who can turn into a cat. But then again, a point in the column for romance is that your friends in Wylde Flowers are fully voiced in English, which is not something you can say for basically any other game on this list. It's an impressive addition.

Spiritfarer

Spiritfarer isn’t wholeheartedly a farming sim, but it has many of the best features of one. If you’re after a game with a bit more story then this is the one for you, and it's a heartwarming and heartbreaking story at that. Spiritfarer sees you play the role of a ferry master helping spirits pass on into the afterlife, inspired by the stories of Charon, although in this version your boat isn't a small canoe: it's a massive house boat with many different rooms to place. You can fish, cook, farm, craft, and mine as you make your way across the beautiful seas of limbo going island to island, making sure the residents of your boat have everything they need before they pass on.

The focus on the community here is what is special about Spiritfarer. Yes, it has all the wonderful busy work and minigames found in farming sims, but instead of using those skills to make a boatload of money or expand your parsnip empire, you use those skills to help other people. You have to take into account everyone's wants and needs as you ferry them to their final passing: an older character prefers her room to be on the ground floor, but also likes to be near the orchard so she can smell the apples. It’s a lovely game.

Sun Haven

Sun Haven is the fantasy equivalent to Stardew Valley, like all the Dragon Age characters wanted to settle down and open a farm - as well as go on the occasional magical quest. There’s magic, dragons, demons, monsters... All the classic fantasy tickboxes you can think of have been well and truly ticked. What makes Sun Haven a great Stardew competitor, though, is that it has much more of a focus on RPG elements and fantasy world-building. There’s a main quest to follow given to you by a giant dragon-lion who also might be a god of the sun (I think?), there are massive skill trees to climb, NPC quests to complete, and you can even choose to play as a demon, angel, elf, elemental, or other fantasy creature yourself.

There’s also a nice emphasis on combat in Sun Haven, with plenty of monsters to whack and even bosses to defeat, which is a cool option for someone looking for a bit more of an active experience, and there's also a multiplier option for up to eight people if you wanted to get your friends involved. But don't feel like there's no farming here at all, as you can still grow many a lovely crop in between your bouts of adventuring. After a solid early access period with a lot of updates, Sun Haven is looking great at full release.

Dinkum

Dinkum is another early access title, but wow is the current release build pretty solid. If you’re after both a Stardew-like and Animal Crossing in one, Dinkum is the perfect middle ground. Set in the wild Australian outback, you’ve moved to an island to get away from your soul-destroying corporate life (as people in these games apparently do all the time) and are tasked with building a town. It’s baby steps at first, cutting down trees, mining for ore, and eating copious amounts of bananas, but soon you’ll be throwing up buildings and businesses in an attempt to motivate people to move to the island.

So yes, it’s very much Animal Crossing New Horizons, and there even more smaller features that make it like Nintendo’s life sim juggernaut too, like the cute jargon noises characters make when you talk to them, or the celebratory zoom-in when you catch a bug or a fish. What separates it though, is its scope. Instead of being given a designated plot of land in most farming sims, you essentially have full run of the island - and it's huge. There’s so much potential for a god-tier farming empire. Also, did I mention there are alligators? Because there are alligators.

Fae Farm

Fae Farm is similar to Coral Island in some respects. There's that beautiful, larger than life, colourful 3D to get on board with, and a mysterious town that moves at a slower pace, complete with friendly locals. But the land of Azoria, which you can play with up to four pals, is more overtly magical. The crops - which have a cool growth cycle, and the animation for pulling them up is great - seem pretty normal, but Azoria is teaming with spirits to find and befriend, and you yourself can earn a pair of wings, which is pretty dope.

Most other things have a slightly magical bent - the dungeon, for example, is full of monsters that are animated lost items, like pocket watches or ships wheels. A highlight is surely the creatures you can keep, which are sort of weird versions of creatures you can find in real life, like sheep that are sort of rabbits as well? It's incredibly cute, to the point of perhaps being offputting if you don't like that sort of thing, but the island has a lot of biomes and secrets to explore and uncover. And at the end of the day you can pull up some juicy turnips.

Do you think we missed something? As always, consider writing an impassioned celebration of the game you love that isn't here. You might convince others to give it a go.