Steam's Open World Survival Crafting Fest offers tree punching at low prices

With only a few weeks left until the Steam Summer Sale, you might think Valve would ease off the gas on its near-constant festival sales. You'd be wrong. The latest in Steam's onslaught of genre fests is a celebration of simple joys like scrounging, avoiding starvation, and sprinting pantsless through the woods until you learn how to turn plant fiber into clothes.

While the name might not have the best mouthfeel, the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest is offering discounts all week long on survival classics. Terraria's at half price for $5, Rust is up for grabs at $20, and No Man's Sky is down to $30—the cheapest all three have been in the last two years.

Recent survival crafting favorites are getting their share of sales, too. February's supernatural survival driver Pacific Drive is 20% off for $24. If you want more of a fantasy flavor for your crafting, January's early access banger Enshrouded has a matching 20% discount for $24.

Let me sneak in a personal recommendation while I have you: Consider Kenshi, currently 60% off for twelve bucks. Not nearly as Rust-y as a lot of what's on sale this week, Kenshi has some admittedly rough edges, but it's an excellent survival RPG sandbox set in a world that's somewhere between Fallout wasteland and Morrowind surreality.

There's more than just sales, too. The fest also brings us the demo for Aska ahead of its early access release in June, meaning you can get an early hands-on look at what Valheim might be like if its vikings understood the importance of task delegation.

The Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest runs until 10 AM PT on June 3, 2024.

Lincoln Carpenter
Contributor

Lincoln spent his formative years in World of Warcraft, and hopes to someday recover from the experience. Having earned a Creative Writing degree by convincing professors to accept his papers about Dwarf Fortress, he leverages that expertise in his most important work: judging a video game’s lore purely on the quality of its proper nouns. With writing at Waypoint and Fanbyte, Lincoln started freelancing for PC Gamer in Fall of 2021, and will take any excuse to insist that games are storytelling toolkits—whether we’re shaping those stories for ourselves, or sharing them with others. Or to gush about Monster Hunter.