Vintage Story 1.2 is pretty good!
Vintage Story is a pretty explicit Minecraft clone - but harder. Many people do experience it as simply "Minecraft but hard." It's heavily inspired by TerraFirmaCraft, a Minecraft mod which made Minecraft slower and harder, with more complex and "realistic" crafting processes. I have seen teenagers online telling one another that Vintage Story is "Minecraft for adults."
I don't know that I would use "for adults" as the descriptor here, but it's definitely Minecraft For Sickos, and specifically for the kind of sicko who gets steamed when crafting processes in games are not "realistic." You drop in to the world and have to immediately knap flint and stones together to make sharpened stone axes and knives. You have to form clay vessels voxel by voxel and fire them in a pit kiln. The game is very interested in making you understand how hard and slow it was to make things in the past - which may actually be the biggest reason I cannot call this game "Minecraft for adults". Adults probably don't have schedules that are the best fit for this game, haha. (I do because I am a freak, and nocturnal.)
I have written before about how the tech power progression that survival/construction games choose to simulate is usually only good for simplifying great accomplishments, not simplifying day to day survival. For example, in Subnautica, you can make a nuclear submarine... but you may still find yourself in a situation where you have to grab a fish with your bare hands for lunch. These games often offer the fantasy of recreating technology or society from scratch, Dr. Stone style, but they never allow you to create the ease or convenience that a real community would enjoy in real life if it were slowly amassing wealth and technology. You never create an effortless surplus of basic survival needs, but you can make gigantic implements of death.
Vintage Story has a pretty different attitude toward power scaling and tech progression. Basic survival tasks are much more laborious and time consuming than in other similar games, and the ceiling of all-powerful automation and death-dealing you can attain seems to be much lower. I do not think it is possible to automate farming at all. You cannot even slam some ingots into a crafting grid to make a metal pickaxe or a sword.
Instead, you have to use a crucible or a bloomery to melt metal into an ingot, then heat it up again on a bed of coals until it is white-hot, then hammer it on an anvil with a hammer. You have to push the individual voxels of the metal around on an outline of the tool, and cut off the excess and make a voxel-derezzed version of the tool manually. Then it goes into your inventory. When it is in your inventory it is still, like, 1000 degrees. You can also burn yourself during the smelting process if you are not holding a pair of wooden tongs when you pick up the white-hot ingots.
All the friction does make it a lot more satisfying to do basic stuff. In Minecraft, cooking eventually became annoying to me. But in Vintage Story, sealing a crock with fat to keep the mashed mushroom porridge inside it edible for an entire calendar year feels like a huge accomplishment. My cellar has around 30 meals in it right now, and each one of them is a testament to my skill and resiliency. Having 30 loaves of bread in Minecraft, meanwhile, is no big deal.
I've been dabbling in this game for the last few years and it's been fun to see it get bigger and bigger. A lot of people say they love it for the story, but I've actually never managed to progress the story at all. It's horror-adjacent... all the monsters are truly grotesque and hideous body-horror things... and I gather that the story will take me into much more direct contact with these gross meaty monsters. Meanwhile, I'm so risk-avoidant in these games that I barely even go into the caves. It'll be a while before I move from surface-mining to the monsters and the deep digs.
And frankly, there's just a lot more to do on the surface of this world than in other similar games. Living day to day is just harder. It takes around two weeks to make a piece of leather. You gotta soak it in TWO different concentrations of tannins, and each of the tannins takes a day to make, and the soaking takes four days. And that's not even all the soaking you gotta do. I did a whole load of leather and only ended up with enough to make a pair of gloves. It's winter now. I wear rags and spend all my time eating termites but I have new gloves, and I'm very proud of them.
Anyway, check it out!