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
News Writer

Lincoln started writing about games while convincing his college professors to accept his essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress, eventually leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte. After three years freelancing for PC Gamer, he joined on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.