If you want games like RimWorld that generate stories instead of scripting them, Dwarf Fortress is still the deepest one made, and Going Medieval is the closest in shape and the easiest to actually start. The list below is ranked by story-generator strength, meaning how often the game hands you a disaster you will retell later, rather than by graphics or polish.

Two answers up front, because they are the questions people actually ask. Free games like RimWorld do exist, and the best of them is legitimately excellent. Mobile games like RimWorld basically do not, and anyone telling you otherwise is padding a list. Both get a proper section further down.

1. Dwarf Fortress

Nothing else generates stories at this density. Dwarf Fortress simulates individual dwarves down to grudges, preferences, and the specific tooth they lost in a tavern brawl, and it remembers all of it. RimWorld took its storyteller idea from here, and the original still runs deeper.

The Steam release costs 29.99 dollars and added a tileset, mouse control, and music. Adventure Mode came out of beta in January 2025, letting you walk a character through the ruins of a fort you already lost. The original text version is still free from Bay 12 Games, which is the cheapest way to find out whether this genre is for you before spending anything.

The problems are real and permanent. The interface is still the least forgiving in the genre even after the Steam pass, and framerate collapses on a large fort after a few in-game years no matter what your CPU cost you.

2. Kenshi

Kenshi tells the meanest stories on this list because it refuses to help you. There are no quests and no tutorial arc. You get a squad of nobodies in a hostile desert, and every limb lost to slavers or cannibals is permanent enough to change how the rest of the run plays out.

Base building arrives once you survive long enough to want walls, and that delay is the point: you earn the colony instead of starting with one. Released in December 2018 by a studio that was one person for most of its twelve-year development, it sits at 95 percent positive across more than 43,000 Steam reviews.

Two warnings. The engine is ancient and the pathfinding will walk your squad into a bandit camp for no reason. And the opening hours are genuinely punishing in a way that has nothing to do with difficulty settings.

3. Going Medieval

This is the closest thing to RimWorld in raw shape, and the one to pick if the others sound like homework. Same colonist jobs, same priority grid, same raid timer, moved to a plague-emptied medieval Europe and rendered in 3D so you can dig a fortress into a hillside and build upward from it.

It stopped being an early access gamble this year. Version 1.0 landed on March 17, 2026 after four years and more than a million copies sold, adding a progression overhaul and six distinct endgame paths. It is also the rare colony sim that pulls people in from the period done properly rather than from science fiction.

Where it falls short of RimWorld is people. Colonists have thinner inner lives, so your best stories come from sieges and winters rather than from someone having a breakdown over a dead cat. There is also no console version, only Steam, Epic, and GOG.

4. Oxygen Not Included

Here the systems write the story, not the characters. You are running an asteroid base where heat, gas pressure, and germs all propagate for real, so a disaster is usually something you built three hours ago finally catching up with you. That is a different kind of drama, and for some people it is the better one.

Klei released it in July 2019 and has kept it fed with expansions since. It runs on Windows and Mac, and it belongs on any shortlist of strategy games worth a PC install even for people who bounce off colony sims generally.

The duplicants are cartoons, though. They have traits but no relationships worth speaking of, so nothing here matches a RimWorld colonist spiraling. The gas-management difficulty spike also loses a lot of players around hour fifteen.

5. Against the Storm

Pick this when you want the settlement-under-pressure feeling in an evening rather than a month. Against the Storm is a roguelite city builder where each settlement runs 40 minutes or so before the rains wipe the map, and you carry upgrades into the next one instead of the buildings.

Its three species want different things and openly resent each other, which supplies most of the friction a colony sim usually gets from individual colonists. If you came to RimWorld through the city-building side of the genre, start here rather than at the top of this list.

The tradeoff is attachment. Nothing you build survives the run, so there is no fort you tend for 200 hours, and it is the least RimWorld-like entry here by a distance.

Free and Mobile Games Like RimWorld

The free answer is easy. The original Dwarf Fortress is still downloadable at no cost from its developers, complete and unlimited, with the same simulation the paid Steam version runs. You trade the tileset and the mouse for an ASCII grid, and that is the entire catch. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the other genuinely free option, open source and grimmer, with base building layered onto a survival roguelike.

Mobile is where you should lower your expectations. RimWorld has never had a phone version, and neither do Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi, Going Medieval, or Oxygen Not Included. The nearest real thing is Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville, a 5 dollar survivor-management game on iOS and Android where you assign named survivors to reclaim city blocks and lose them to raiders. It is a 2015 game and it plays like one, but it is honest colony management on a phone. For anything else, our list of mobile strategy that is actually free is a better use of your time than hunting a port that does not exist.

Where to Start

Match the pick to how much friction you want between you and the story.

Going Medieval if you want to be playing within ten minutes. Dwarf Fortress if you want the deepest simulation ever built and will fight the interface to get it, or the free version if you want to find that out before paying. Kenshi if you want to be humiliated first and rewarded later. Oxygen Not Included if you would rather debug a base than manage people. Against the Storm if your play sessions are short.

The thing worth remembering is that RimWorld’s real trick was never the raids. It was that the game kept a record of who your colonists were before the raid arrived. The picks that rank highest here are the ones that also keep that record. More of this corner of the genre is broken down in our economic simulation guides, and everything else lives at Strategygame.org.

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