Starsand Island is the first can't-miss cozy game of 2026 and it's already taken over 20 hours from me

Starsand Island - the player character looks shocked — (Image credit: Seed Sparkle Lab)

Every couple years we get one: that farm sim game that everyone talks about. In 2024 it was Fields of Mistria and in 2026 I think we're already looking at this year's belle of the ball with Starsand Island. It's taken me 25 hours just to complete my first season in Starsand and I fear I may sink another 100 hours into it before the month is over thanks to some big crafting quest demands and a shockingly detailed home building system.

I've also broken down Starsand Island's early access features if you're trying to judge whether it meets your personal fam sim checklist.

Lauren Morton

After growing up on Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and clocking thousands of hours in modern farm sims, I may be a little set in my ways. I'm a known build mode hyper-fixater and fishing minigame hater. I've also got a strong preference for 2D and pixelated farm sims, usually finding the 3D ones have awkward controls and a less polished visual style. So, Starsand Island had its work cut out to win me over but (spoiler alert) I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Starsand Island - the player looks successful, standing at a tree stump crafting table — (Image credit: Seed Sparkle Lab)

Starsand Island is a farm sim that's heavy on crafting. It has five different careers that I can simultaneously pursue: crafting, farming, ranching, exploration, and fishing, but they all fundamentally come back to collecting raw resources and processing them at a variety of machines that I've got to stick on my property. It's got that overflowing workshop effect of the My Time at series and Palia, though never quite as resource grind-y as I remember Portia being. I spent my first 10 hours just plopping workstations outside my front door until I finally decided to organize them nicely. Starsand Island had won me over long before I made that optimization investment, though.

Main character moment

Starsand Island opens on an animated musical montage of the default main character, in classic farm sim fashion, disillusioned with salary worker life in the city and remembering her idyllic childhood on Starsand. After that, it's a bit of a smash cut to showing up at your new farm south of town and being shown around by your childhood bestie. What was more surprising was that Starsand actually meets the visual quality expectation set by that intro.

I've been a bit of a grump about 3D farm sims in the past because most haven't appealed to me stylistically (sorry to Portia and Sandrock) and saddled with interface designs that look like first drafts. I won't belabor that when you can easily see for yourself that yeah, Starsand looks good. It controls better than other 3D options too, with some nice rumble feedback for tools if you use a gamepad and vehicle controls that have gotten less skate-y since the first build I played.

Island life

Starsand Island - A player waters crops outside their house — (Image credit: Seed Sparkle Lab)

With the first impression test passed, I spent my first week on Starsand getting to grips with its professions and exploring the island. The whole place feels more lively than most farm sims thanks to tourists wandering around town to chat with so it doesn't feel like a place where only 30 locals live.

The map is a bit daunting at first with tons of shops in the main square—a tailor, farm shop, record store, furniture store, and a lot more—and a decently large explorable island leading to a traditional temple up north of the village. After a few days, and being encouraged to rent my first mount, an alpaca from my neighbor Pastelle's ranch, I started to more confidently find my way around to deliver quests and drop off gifts to the locals I'd prioritized as my possible spouses. Hot tip: biker chick Neona loves quartz. Don't ask how many days I spent figuring that out.

In between deliveries, I'm meant to be following its main quest line which begins with construction on an island train line. I'm also progressing in its five professions by crafting tools and structures with a variety of processed wood planks, smelted ores, and rabbit fluff textiles.

The average day on Starsand will feel pretty familiar to most farm sim players:

Wake up and water crops (unless it's raining)
Pet my four chickens and four rabbits and collect their eggs and fur
Dump everything into my labeled storage chests
Ride into town on my moped to deliver gifts to my prospective girlfriends
Pick up more watermelon seeds at the farm shop
Take two requests of the local notice board to deliver resources to townies
Ride back home to plant those watermelons
Spend too long building the rear deck I've envisioned for my house
Walk back and forth between crafting stations creating planks and ores for my next quest
Look at the clock and realize it is 23:00 (in game and in real life)

Starsand Island - A player stands beside crafting machines in their yard — Oops it's 23:00 again. (Image credit: Seed Sparkle Lab)

I pass most of the next two in game weeks in that fashion, never short on tasks that need crafted. Leveling up as a rancher requires building a hutch for my bunnies and trying to breed them into a rare lop-earned variant. The Starsand Island train station needs a soup dumpling delivery from my campfire and some glass panes from my cutter station. That pergola lattice I envisioned needs a ton of stone mined from the dungeon-like Enchanted Forest behind my house.

What really won me over on Starsand was all the little optimizations in between those farm sim game touchstones. It smartly targets pain points that regular farmlife sim players are all familiar with.

Starsand Island - build mode tools — (Image credit: Seed Sparkle Lab)

Yes, I have a bunch of storage chests as usual, but I can label them and see their names before opening them, instead of rigging together little signs and toggling between all the chests on my property whenever I need something. Yes, I've got to constantly run around town in glorified fetch-quest fashion but I can do it on the back of a llama or a skateboard, which is fun. Yes, the relationships all involve just tossing gifts at everyone I know each day until I find out which items they love, but the cutscenes are quite primo with voice acting and all—at least the introductions I've seen so far because I've not managed to go on a proper date yet.

At the end of my 28 days of summer on Starsand I've made it to tier 2/5 in four of its five professions, reached the first of five friendship tiers with just eight townies, and probably spent too long on that pergola. There's still a lot left of this game to see, so don't expect to find me playing much else for several real world weeks.

Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She joined the PCG staff in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years.

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