The best farming games like Stardew Valley on PC

The cream of the crop, updated for 2023

Feature by Rachel Watts Reviews Editor

Additional contributions by Katharine Castle

Updated on Jan. 13, 2023

There’s nothing like kicking back with a relaxing farming game like Stardew Valley. Throwing some seeds into the ground and nurturing them until they grow into a mega crop of produce is as satisfying as it is calming. Alas, some of the best farming games like Stardew Valley at the moment aren't available on PC - games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Rune Factory - and while you can, in fact, mod Stardew Valley to make it feel more like Animal Crossing, it’s not really the same.

Thankfully there are plenty of excellent PC alternatives for you to flex your green thumb, and we’ve gathered the absolute cream of the crop below. Not all of them completely focus on farming, but we’ve made sure that farming plays a central role in every single one of them. We've also included games with other must-have Stardew traits, such as cozy communities of people to befriend, some fishing, a little bit of mining, collectibles, and maybe a cheeky bit of romance.

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

Ooblets

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It’s tough choosing the cutest farming game on this list, but Ooblets’ bubblegum visuals, quirky farming produce, and adorable critters ich 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 Portia

Probably the closest like for like game for long-time Stardew veterans, this farming and town building sim has buckets of character to pull you into its familiar rhythms of planting, gathering resources and crafting new tools.There's a lot more to do than just sowing seeds, too. While there's plenty to farming to get stuck in with here, My Time At Portia is primarily a town building game, and a lot of the commissions you'll be undertaking involve constructing new items for your fellow townsfolk. You'll find these in the wider, rather pretty post-apocalyptic world of Portia, as well as by hacking and slashing your way through its myriad of dungeons and monster-infested plains, adding a light RPG layer to the mix that helps bolster your character's underlying stats - including that all important stamina bar to keep you farming and crafting for longer. If you're after something pure and wholesome, My Time At Portia is for you.

My Time at Portia's wild west-focused cousin, My Time at Sandrock is currently in Steam early access and even though we think it's got famring list entry potential, it's still not quite as good as Portia. We'll revisit this decision when it gets a full release sometime in 2023.

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 here 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, 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. At first glance, it seems like there's absolutely nothing wrong. You're still growing little veg patches and crafting bits and bobs for your neighbours in the village, but then a skull starts barking orders at you and it all goes a bit supernatural.

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. Yep, as well as being a farmer turned graveyard keeper, you can also dabble in a bit of alchemy on the side. Just watch out for that donkey, though, as 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.

Whereas 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 Stardew-like. 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 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.

Forager

Forager is a bit more fast-paced than some of the other farming games on this list, but if the main appeal of Stardew Valley is settling into its rhythms of collecting, building and crafting, then Forager will scratch several of those pixelated itches. It's a 2D, lo-fi blend of idle game mechanics and active exploring, where you'll constantly be to-ing and fro-ing between its various land masses hoovering up plants, cows, gold and more as you build more and more stuff to expand your foraging empire.

Everything you collect has one of three destinations. Most of it will get tipped into your furnace to help you pump out stuff even faster, but you'll also be chucking some of it onto your anvil to craft new tools, and ringing the rest of it through your sewing machine so you can deck yourself out in ever stronger duds to fight the local monsters. The pace of it can be a bit relentless at times, but it's also strangely hypnotic, too, combining the zen-like quality of a clicker game with Stardew's soothing country-living.

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 gibing you bundles - it’s all familiar territory.

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 game for you. Spiritfarer sees you play the role of a ferry master helping spirits pass on into the afterlife. You can fish, cook, farm, craft, and mine, as you make your way across the beautiful seas of limbo, 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. 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 have been well and truly ticked. What makes Sun Haven a great Stardew competitor 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 and more.

There’s also a nice emphasis on combat in Sun Haven with plenty of monsters to whack and even bosses to defeat. I’ve not dabbled as much with monster fighting but it’s pretty cool that it’s there. There’s also a multiplier option for up to eight people if you wanted to get your friends involved. Don’t be put off that the game is till in early access, the build is pretty solid and the developers and constantly adding patches and fun updates.

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, 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 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? There are alligators.

Disney Dreamlight Valley

I think we were all a bit dubious when Disney announced they were releasing a life-sim competitor, but Dreamlight Valley has proven itself to be, actually, pretty good. Dreamlight is definitely geared at players who have a lot of affection for the Disney films, so this might not be the one for you if you’re not a fan of Mr. Michael Mouse.

You can cook, farm, craft, and mine for resources in Dreamlight Valley as well as complete quests for rewards set by Disney’s character folk. There’s lots of busy work to be getting on with, but since it’s in early access there are only a couple of hours of story and character quests so far (even with the handful of updates). There’s also the occasional annoying bug or two, so hopefully, Gameloft will be sorting those out soon. Other than that, its laid-back vibe and task hand-holding make a nice change of pace from the pressures of never-ending progression checklists found in other life-sims and makes it a much more approachable game for younger players.

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.