General What’s the Best Survival Settlement Manager?

Not all city builders are about crafting the perfect utopia - some just want to see how long you can last before everything collapses. Managing food, resources, weather, and unpredictable disasters is just as important as expanding.

Which survival-focused settlement game do you think does it best?

• Frostpunk – A city builder that actively hates you. The cold is relentless, hope is fragile, and every choice comes with consequences.
• Banished – One bad winter, one mismanaged food supply, and suddenly your entire village is starving to death. A true test of slow, careful expansion.
• RimWorld – Not just survival, but emergent storytelling. Colonists have their own personalities, random disasters strike at the worst time, and the AI storyteller ensures something will go horribly wrong.
• Oxygen Not Included – A deep, system-driven survival game where managing heat, oxygen, water, and waste is just as important as keeping your Dupes happy.
• Surviving the Aftermath – Post-apocalyptic city-building with resource gathering, colony defence, and constant external threats.

Which game nailed survival mechanics while still being fun to manage? And what’s the worst disaster that completely wiped out one of your settlements?

I've never played any of these games, but they've given me some great recommendations to try out, so thanks for that!

I love these apocalyptic/survival type games. When I was a teenager, I got hugely into a text-based MMORPG that was based on the survivors of a zombie apocalypse banding together to fight hordes, gather resources, build clans, fight each other, etc. It was a really basic game, coded by another (slightly older) teenager, who put a lot of time and effort into it, even if it wasn't the high-tech game that many of us are used to playing. We fostered a real sense of community on the game - at it's height it had a couple of hundred daily active players, there was real community drama and feuds, and the game was just as enjoyable as any game you'd play on your PC or console.

Ah, nostalgia!