Post Script
All your base
Most outposts have a generous landing platform for your airship, but a careless descent can still damage the vehicle
Did you, as a child, ever build a den in a forest or a blanket fort in your room? If you did, you’ll understand the appeal of base building in survival games. Minecraft, Valheim and No Man’s Sky provide the same sense of imagined mastery of the wilderness as building a damp lean-to out of some branches and a log, only imbued with all the carpentry and masonry skills that children (and most adults) typically lack.
Base building is as fundamental a part of survival gaming as hunger meters and holding down the mouse button on sticks and stones to make an axe appear in your inventory. As survival games have proliferated, though, and the basic loop of chopping trees and scoffing berries has become rote, base building has increasingly needed to share its meticulously crafted campfire with exploration. This has led to a growing tension within the genre. As exploration has become more prominent, the idea of a stationary base has come into conflict with wanderlust. As you push deeper into these games, it becomes less convenient to traipse back to your starting shack to craft a new axe or rejig your inventory.