Craftopia
Our first choice, from the same developer
Craftopia comes from Pocketpair, the same studio behind Palworld, and in many ways it's the game Palworld grew out of: open-world survival with resource gathering, farming, factory automation, dungeon crawling against bosses, fishing, vehicles and a skill tree, plus monster hunting and taming layered on top.
We'd choose it first for a Palworld player who wants to see where the ideas came from — it leans even harder into automation and factory-building, and mixes in more genres at once (RPG, strategy, survival) than Palworld settled on for its own focused release.
It's been in Early Access since 2020, so expect a looser, more experimental game than Palworld's more polished, focused design — this is the sketchbook, not the finished painting. Online and LAN co-op are both supported if you want to explore that sprawl with friends.
Valheim
For survival and building without the creature-taming
Valheim sends one to ten players into a procedurally generated Norse-mythology world to explore, fight, build and craft their way toward a series of biome-gated boss fights. After years in Early Access, it finally reached its full 1.0 release in September 2026.
We like it for the Palworld player whose favorite part is the survival-and-base-building loop itself — scavenging materials, raising a hall, preparing for the next tough fight — even without Palworld's creature-collecting hook. The boss-gated progression gives exploration a clear sense of direction.
There's no taming, no Pal-style companion army and no combat pets to build a team around — progression here is about your own character and gear, not a roster of creatures. Choose Valheim when base-building and boss-hunting are the draw, and leave the taming behind.
Necesse
For a settlement that grows into something bigger
Necesse drops you into an infinite, procedurally generated 2D world to build a settlement, run dungeons, fight bosses, mine and recruit settlers to grow your colony — played solo or in co-op, including dedicated servers that can host large numbers of players at once.
We'd point a Palworld player here if the base-building and growing-settlement side is the real appeal, more than the creature-taming — recruiting and managing settlers gives Necesse's colony a different kind of momentum than Palworld's roster of Pals.
Its top-down 2D presentation is a big visual departure from Palworld's 3D open world, and there's no creature-taming system at all — settlers and dungeon loot replace Pals entirely. Pick this for the colony-growing loop in a different art style, not a Pal-taming substitute.
Smalland: Survive the Wilds
For survival at a completely different scale
Smalland: Survive the Wilds shrinks you down to insect size in an oversized, hazardous world, where ordinary plants and animals become genuine threats. Up to ten players can team up online to craft weapons and armor, tame and ride creatures, and build encampments on the ground or up in the trees.
We like it for a Palworld player curious what the same craft-tame-and-build loop feels like with the scale flipped — danger comes from the everyday world looming over you rather than from a roster of collectible Pals with their own stat sheets.
The tiny-scale premise is the whole hook, and it changes the texture of survival considerably — climbing a blade of grass replaces trekking across open terrain. Choose it for that scale-shift novelty, not for Palworld's specific style of creature collection and combat.
Raft
For survival stripped down to the essentials
Raft puts you adrift at sea on a steadily expanding raft, hooking floating debris, scavenging reefs and islands, farming, cooking and researching new crafts while fending off sharks circling below. It can be played solo or in online co-op with no stated player cap.
We'd recommend it to a Palworld player who wants the crafting and scavenging loop pared down to something tighter and more focused, with the raft itself as a satisfying long-term building project rather than a sprawling open-world base.
There's no creature-taming or combat-pet system at all here — the loop is purely scavenging, building and surviving at sea. Pick Raft when a smaller, more contained survival project sounds appealing, and look elsewhere on this list for anything resembling Palworld's Pals.
