Best Automation Games on Steam
Games about building systems that gather, craft, route, and optimize themselves.
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1Palworld - Fight, farm, build and work alongside mysterious creatures called "Pals" in this completely new multiplayer, open world survival and crafting game!
Jul 9, 2026
In this game, you can…
- hand a sheep a rocket launcher and let it wipe out a bandit camp for you.
- lasso a fire-breathing duck and hook it up to your base generator for electricity.
- put cute creatures on an assembly line to mine ore and mass-produce ammo around the clock.
- craft guns after starting out with nothing on a beach.
- catch creatures, then assign them to fight, mount, and work at your base before everyone eats and sleeps together.
- use your creatures to run your whole base: smelt, harvest, haul, build structures, and keep production going as long as they're fed.
- ride creatures across land, sea, and sky to reach places you can't access on foot.
- enter a boss portal that tells you what's inside, kill or capture the boss, and bring it home in a loot explosion.
2Schedule I - From small-time dope pusher to kingpin - manufacture and distribute a range of drugs throughout the grungy city of Hyland Point. Expand your empire with properties, businesses, employees and more.
Mar 24, 2025
In this game, you can…
- mix drugs with other ingredients to create effects like super jump, speed boosts, or turning users into ticking time bombs.
- pickpocket the whole city by day, then go gambling at night as part of the same routine.
- buy a Golden Skateboard, break in through a shack window, knock a guy out, then pickpocket him to get your money back.
- build a drug empire from nothing, scaling into properties, employees, dealers, laundering, and automated production across Hyland Point.
- run the entire operation hands-on: water and trim plants, mix ingredients, bag and package product, test purity, then coordinate in-person handoffs.
- discover weird recipes and lace your product with absurd additives that radically change what it does to people.
- stack boxes and barrels to climb over fences and slip past police patrols during curfew.
- set up dealers to unload lower-quality batches while you keep experimenting with new mixes, keeping money flowing while you expand.
3Satisfactory - Satisfactory is a first-person open-world factory building game with a dash of exploration and combat. Play alone or with friends, explore an alien planet, create multi-story factories, and enter conveyor belt heaven!
Sep 10, 2024
In this game, you can…
- walk in one direction for 30 minutes and realize it's all one connected 30 km² world.
- build a 4 km pipeline just to bring crude oil back to base.
- power an acre-long production line with nuclear energy, then use the leftovers to build a racetrack in the desert.
- turn a pristine alien landscape into a sprawling logistics megafactory.
- go from hand-mining ore to running powered drills, vehicles, jetpacks, and trains in the same save.
- string conveyor belts across cliffs and valleys until the terrain is basically your factory's floor plan.
- expand from hand-crafting parts to fully automated production lines that keep making them while you do something else.
4Factorio - Factorio is a game about building and creating automated factories to produce items of increasing complexity, within an infinite 2D world. Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you.
Aug 14, 2020
In this game, you can…
- lay down a base blueprint and have hundreds of flying robots swarm out to build the whole thing for you.
- turn your own pollution into a trigger for escalating alien attacks, then answer with turrets, flamethrowers, laser walls, and artillery.
- watch one slow belt starve a whole smelter line, then chase the fix into new mines, defenses, trains, and a bigger power grid.
- go from chopping trees by hand to a coal-powered setup that keeps crafting grenades while you're off building elsewhere.
- tear down a working factory and rebuild the entire layout at once using thousands of construction robots.
- build a rail network that connects distant mines and outposts, then run multiple trains through it without crashes or jams.
- unlock an oil chain that forces you to refine, crack, and route multiple fluids just to keep science production fed.
- create a factory so huge you can't fully understand it anymore, with belts looping for miles just to feed one machine.
- build an automated machine empire that can run overnight while robots repair, haul, and keep production moving.
5ASTRONEER - Interact with strange new worlds in a unique and tactile way, molding the environment itself as if it were clay in your hands. Build your base, master resource management, automate your production lines, and more as you unravel the mysteries of the universe, alone or with friends.
Feb 5, 2019
In this game, you can…
- build a ramp from a mountain up through the atmosphere until you're literally in space, with the planet rotating under you.
- activate alien gateways that teleport you to a planet's center, then solve a system-wide chain that ends above the star.
- sculpt terrain into actual architecture: wall off your base, add a lip to catch debris, then roof the whole thing with engineered entrances.
- steer your drop pod on the way down and pick your landing spot.
- print modular machines right out of your landing pod and snap them into a working little space base.
- dig a perfectly sloped tunnel hundreds of feet down, then hit loot, hostile plants, and oxygen-bearing crystals in the dark.
- lay tethers as an oxygen lifeline that leaves a visible trail back home while you explore.
- hook trailers into absurdly long rover convoys, then switch to trains to move stuff through huge cave networks.
- fly off to a new planet in your first shuttle, then realize you only packed enough fuel for two trips and you're stuck there.
6Dyson Sphere Program - Build the most efficient intergalactic factory in space simulation strategy game Dyson Sphere Program! Harness the power of stars, collect resources, plan and design production lines and develop your interstellar factory from a small space workshop to a galaxy-wide industrial empire.
Jan 20, 2021
In this game, you can…
- lift off a planet and fly to another one with no loading screens.
- launch parts into space and watch a Dyson Sphere grow around a star, layer by layer, until it's visible from the ground.
- set up drones and ships that automatically move parts between planets while you build elsewhere.
- cover an entire planet in factories, then move on to build whole specialized production planets in the same system.
- wrap a belt line all the way around a planet's equator and let it feed projects on the far side.
- build solar panel rings and then fill orbit with thousands of solar sails.
- unlock warp travel and jump to other star systems, visit a black hole, then return with rare resources.
- save a factory layout as a blueprint and stamp the same module down across planet after planet.
7The Planet Crafter - A space survival open world terraforming crafting game, designed for 1 to 10 players. Alter the ecosystem of an inhospitable planet to render it habitable for humanity. Survive, gather resources, and build your base. Then, generate oxygen, warmth, and pressure to create a brand new biosphere.
Apr 10, 2024
In this game, you can…
- build too low and slowly watch the rising waterline flood your entire starter base into a lake.
- turn a dead red planet into blue skies, lakes, grass, and forests.
- launch rockets to boost terraforming, and watch them crash into each other if you fire too many.
- upgrade from hand-built survival gear to drones, auto-crafters, and production lines that run the planet for you.
- place grass spreaders, tree spreaders, and butterfly or frog setups to grow specific patches of life exactly where you want.
- explore wrecks and hidden ship interiors, read logs, and piece together an eerie subplot from what you find.
- reach the point where the planet is breathable, oxygen stops mattering, and drones start sorting crates while you travel by portals.
8Stormworks: Build and Rescue - Join a world where you design, create and pilot your own air sea rescue service. Release your inner hero as you battle fierce storms out at sea to rescue those in need.
Sep 17, 2020
In this game, you can…
- pump water out of an airlock 200 meters underwater, juggling fluid pressure until the chamber clears.
- build a missile that loiters around a waypoint until a target appears, then guides itself in for a strike.
- use radar automation to coordinate an automatic drone firefighter swarm as a tiny robotic emergency fleet.
- design your own air-sea rescue fleet, then take it into storms to fight fires, repair oil rigs, and run power stations.
- wire a full command center with cameras, live monitors, and radios you built, then run the whole vehicle remotely.
- iterate a boat through failures until it becomes a 200+ km/h hydrofoil that outruns most multiplayer craft.
- design a pipeline that flexes with waves, locks together, and feeds an oil rig while a tug boat holds everything in place.
- fly a helicopter through heavy winds and land it in rough seas, where the waves are big enough to punish bad design.
9Necesse - Build, quest, and conquer across an infinite procedurally generated world. Play alone or with friends as you establish a settlement and explore deep dungeons, fight monsters and bosses, mine rare ores, craft magical equipment, recruit specialists for your colony, and more!
Oct 16, 2025
In this game, you can…
- dump your whole inventory into a sorting chest and have villagers route everything into the right storage by your rules.
- bring 10+ settlers with you on an expedition, where bosses scale up with every extra follower you add.
- sail to the edge of the world, assemble map fragments into treasure charts, and reveal new islands with dungeons, hostile settlements, and pirate bosses.
- set a restock button to refill your entire expedition loadout from storage before you head out again.
- send settlers out as miners, hunters, anglers, and explorers who bring back ore, meat, fish, and cave loot while you do other things.
- recruit settlers you find in the world, like freeing someone trapped in a vampire-infested church and bringing them back to your village.
- build lever-activated trap corridors for raids, lock settlers inside, and let the traps or your ranged fire handle intruders.
- walk into a cave for iron and come out with a pet penguin and a bat-shooting magic staff.
10Mindustry - An open-ended factory management game with RTS and tower defense elements.
Sep 26, 2019
In this game, you can…
- capture a sector, log off, and come back to find it producing resources or getting attacked without you.
- send resources across the planet with launch pads to keep distant battlefronts supplied.
- write logic scripts that control your factory and even command units with custom behaviors.
- pause, queue an entire base redesign, then unpause and watch it build itself.
- build artillery far away, then stack mines, knockback, water, oil, and fire to stop enemies from ever reaching you.
- construct your own units, assemble an army, and send it to capture territory or smash enemy bases.
- survive hundreds of enemy waves until a couple artillery shots are deleting thousands at once.
- make entire new planets and campaigns with mods, then playtest your own tech trees and enemies.
