Grindy games on Deck

azezeB@discuss.tchncs.de to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 44 points –

Hi everyone, I'm looking for some grindy games to play on the deck (any genre is OK).

Currently playing monster hunter world and I think I'll give factorio a try.

Any suggestions?

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Factorio ought to keep you busy for about 500 hours even without mods

I've heard enough that I wish I pulled the trigger last month.

The best time to plant a time-sinking tree is 100 years ago. The second best time is today.

Was it on sale or something?

Yeah, winter sale

Edit: no, it's never been on sale, this is what I get for not looking at SteamDB before commenting.

Wow, that one never goes on sale. Sad I missed that

Even at full price, it is totally worth it. And I'm saying that as someone who has only ever bought 1 game at full price.

I just finished a 200 hour Rampant playthrough yesterday (on my PC) so I love me some Factorio. But I can’t imagine how it plays with console controls. Is it decent?

The dev went to great lengths to optimize the controller support. He wrote about it on his blog while he was working on it. Pretty interesting stuff.

I haven't looped back to the game since it was added. How would you say the controller support is compared to the trackpad style setups that were previously required on Deck?

I’ve only played on the Steam Deck but I found the controls to be fairly intuitive and easy to use. I’ve played over 160 hours and never once wished I had a keyboard and mouse instead.

I appreciate the effort, all works, but I think it's still very difficult to play factorio on a handheld only imo. I tried it. Some game formats just don't work well on handhelds...

You could probably play the SCS Truck Simulator games basically indefinitely.

Vampire Survivors is an absurdly addicting Deck game, and can be considered grindy if you go for the eggs late-game.

Deep Rock Galactic is a good one too, if you're okay with no aim assist and playing solo or with randoms.

I can't believe I have a fancy ass gaming PC and played like 50+ hours of Vampire Survivor.

Then bought a Steam Deck and played another 50+ hours of Vampire Survivor.

No mans Sky is pretty good. My buddy and I teamed up and make a series of production facilities across a network of planets in order to provide enough materials to manufacture the most expensive items in the game.

There was no reason to do that considering how charitable people are, but we just did it anyway.

You can also grind for the best ships and gear and stuff, or build a base on a planet or on a space freighter.

I attempted to do that once. I got a couple hours into calculating exactly what all I needed before giving up. Especially after figuring out it's not even the best way to make money in the game. But I've also spent hours and hours designing and building bases just for fun, so I get it.

Yeah I couldn’t have done it alone. My friend did the calculation and I did the planet hunting. We’d team up to pinpoint optimal resource points and constructing their facilities. However, since he owned some facilities and I owned others, we could only access them all when we were both online. Also, only he had the recipe for some parts and I the others, so we had to do some passing back and forth to complete the process. We only ever did it once and realized we probably wouldn’t need to do it ever again with all the money we got out of it.

Gunfire Reborn, Hades, Vampire Survivor, Cyberpunk 2077, Carrion, Slime Rancher 1 & 2, Stardew Valley, Warframe, Death Stranding, Wreckfest, Orcs Must Die 3, Castle Crashers, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Dead Cells are all over the map genre wise but all have grindy elements that may or may not vibe with you.

really enjoying halls of torment, vampire survivors, project zomboid, and persona 5 on the deck lately. And of course Palworld runs great, very grindy but i’ve been playing it mainly on desktop.

I've been meaning to try that one on my deck but if it runs, I'd definitely recommend Palworld

Seconding Halls of Torment. It’s a perfect game for the deck. I spent about 80 hours 100%ing it. There’s your grind! Not bad for 5 bucks.

Factorio is indeed a great choice. Whenever you're ready for more Monster Hunter, Risse+Sunbreak is also amazing (playing it now myself). ARPGs like Grim dawn and Chronicon also give plenty of playtime if they're your style.

Path of Exile has a lot of good grind to it. Every league added mechanics, and a bunch of them went core over the years. Also, if you haven't hit the Guiding Lands in MHW, the grind gets real there.

How do you define grind? I went from zero to sixty hours in Rimworld in the span of a few weeks and IMO it plays quite well on the deck (not perfect, but surprisingly well for a traditionally M&K PC game).

I agree about the controls. I played on PC many times beforehand. They did a decent job of adapting it to the steam deck.

If you're fine with any genre, I've found Survivorlikes to be a good bit of time killing fun on the Deck. Vampire Survivor is the obvious choice, but Halls of Torment is a much more polished interpretation with the look and feel of classic dungeon crawlers like Diablo.

Warframe. I played it for 1400 hours, and I can attest that it is grindy.

But it's still fun, and there's a lot of content for a F2P game. You can even earn the premium currency by grinding (and a few events throughout the year). It's Deck Verified, too!

Seconded. Let's not bring up playtimes and make anyone feel any sort of way but with over a decade of development, there will be something you can do. You can fish, you can hunt, you can ride a hoverboard, you can dance. Most of those things are just Open world things, but Warframe also has standard randomized tileset missions where premade tiles are laid out by way of some algorithm to make every mission unique while being built out of pieces you can become incredibly familiar with.

Beyond this, now that Cross Play and more importantly, cross save/progression is active you will have so many sweaty vets willing to help you on your platform (the Deck) and from other platforms like switch, PS4/5, and Xbone/Series.

If anyone feels interested in this game, definitely dip your toes and just take it slow. No need to rush things since you can always just take a break and try something else while things are building.

What type of purchases are there? Anything required?

You never have to pay a cent. The game may still let new players believe that gear is locked behind a paywall but most items in the market have blueprints that you build by gathering materials in game and then waiting.

The things you can't buy blueprints for from the in game market are usually from clans which should be free to join (i.e., if someone is demanding you pay them for joining find a better clan) or earned in game during missions.

To be fair it has been a while since I was buying new weapons in the market because I am near level cap so I'm not sure how prominent the "Buy Blueprint" option is compared to the "spend premium currency" option but they did revise those screens to make it more apparent that real money doesn't need to change hands

That being said, if you wanna drop a few thousand I'm sure you can buy every available cosmetic, all the available weapons, all the available characters, the supporters packs, the prime access that's currently available, etc. I made my first purchase at like 500 hours and that was because I really felt they were improving the product better than some Triple A titles were at the time.

Stop by Dormi.zone to see what fans of the series are saying here on Lemmy. Afaik we aren't sanctioned by Digital Extremes but we haven't hit the critical mass of other websites yet so they don't see fit to pay developers to watch these boards.

ESO can be grindy depending on what you do.

Playing this myself in anticipation of the upcoming expansion adding skill customization.

Plays well on the Deck, plus mods are great to help make some of the grind even better (I'm loving the lazy writ crafting mod).

im minimal with my mods but tamriel trading centre is pretty much required.

i wrote a command line addon updater for the steam deck. https://joyo.dev/eso/banana

Minecraft: Dungeons, easily. I usually play that with a show on or something, it's mindless fun

Monster Hunter is my favourite grindy series, and World just recently got verified

Siralim Ultimate

Love the Siralim games. Very Dragon Quest Monsters feel

This is my first one and I'm really appreciating how different it feels from something like Pokemon. There's so much room for making interesting party strats

GregTech: New Horizons (A minecraft modpack) should keep you busy for… about 8000 hours?

Cyberpunk 2077, 250 quests. I haven't started phantom thieve yet.

103 hours in and one mission away from having nothing left to do. Amazing game and I can see myself doing it again in a year or two.

Have you tried the Ys series of action RPGs? Ys VIII is a lot of grindy monster whacking fun and runs great on Deck.

I got Ys I & II origins for deck, along with Oath and maybe Memories (III and IV) back in the holiday sale to get myself into that series. I’m somewhere in the middle of II, possibly near the end, but I find the world so endearing and the bump system fun in a weird, arcadey way. 1 was super short, and the boss fights aren’t always fun for me because I don’t like bullet-hell stuff, but I can see myself riding it through.

I got curious because did the same with the trails games (currently finishing up Cold Steel II) and haven’t been able to put it down.

I’m also curious about the dragon quest games.