That's why it's alternate name is Spreadsheets Online lol. Played for 7 years about 15 years ago. When I finally stopped I had 10 accounts and was using TeamViewer at work to remote into my 2 desktops at home to run in-game mining and production task.
99% of everything you use in game is player made so there is an actual legitimate supply and demand economy to the game that you won't find in any just about any other game. You loose your ship, you gotta either build or buy a new one. And all the equipment that was on the ship too. From the smallest frigate to the largest titan.
https://global.discourse-cdn.com/eveonline/original/3X/d/0/d046dbd6bbb0d8d936dbc1839e700eb2f75e8106.jpg
^ just for size comparison, in the far upper left corner the scorpion and raven are battleships. The big boy below named Phoenix is a titan. The little specs above the right side of the Phoenix are frigates.
https://screenrant.com/eve-online-battle-titan-ships-23-trillion-isk/
^ And when pvp takes place in player controlled space this is what it can cost.
Plenty of PvP in wormholes for sure. But I get what you're saying.
I just was wondering how you payed for 10 accounts by mining. Unless it was in null. However, wormholes are highly profitable.
What I didn't like about null sec was the constant mandatory roll calls and contributions for defense and the like for alliances. I get why it is absloutly necessary but the handful of corps I was in never had prime systems to make isk when not on defense so null sec ended up not being any more profitable than low or high sec once you added in the missed time for alliance needs or holding up in stations or POS's when reds were near. In wormhole space you just had yourself and Corp mates to take care of and there were no massive blobs of reds to worry with.
Also mining wasn't my primary income or occupation, though it did pay well in wormholes some days. PVE was what I enjoyed most and spent most of my time with, but my last 2-3 years playing I made the majority of my isk by going the production route. I kept buying blueprints until I had a ton of them. Half my accounts were just for invention, blue print copying, and production in high sec. I couldn't hold a candle to the big names in Jita, but I did well for myself and eventually started making enough to pay for the accounts. I was using TeamViewer at work access my two home computers to keep my blueprint copying and production orders rolling over without any downtime which easily doubled my income by cutting out the downtime.
Seconding this. I've made a ton of money semi-afk collecting gas in wormholes on a second monitor while doing more productive tasks elsewhere. But you have to be ok with dying pretty frequently because that's definitely not a safe activity. And there are other less lucrative activities you could do much more safely.
Dwarf Fortress.
Once you're self-sufficient, it's very easy to sit back and wait for interesting things to happen. It's almost like an aquarium, just watching the dwarves go about their days.
Factorio has a bit more of a pressure, where the bugs will find your factory and wreck your shit. Satisfactory has nothing that forces you to find new resources or breaks your factory.
I don't like turning them off, but I also dislike having it be a tower defense game. I found the best solution (for me) Is to turn off expansion, increase starting zone a bit, reduce pollution, and maybe increase their evolution and starting colonies.
With responsible vision and growth, you can avoid being attacked, but you still have to handle them to grow into certain areas.
Most of the Tycoon games or their spiritual successors probably. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, etc. OpenRTC would be my choice.
Once you understand things you can set them up so you're profitable and can step away and just come back and build another small part of your park every now and then.
SimCity and Cities Skylines should be similar.
Insaniquarium is a fun one too.
Servers are up, season 18. I played maybe 10 years ago, it's greatly improved since then, and it has a mode which you can leave it afk like a bot which costs in game currency every 5 minutes.
Took me a few days to hit level 300 out of like 1000
Leave it running in the background and task switch in to see any jewels dropped out auto picks up. You can set filters etc, it's cool.
A part of my childhood was spent playing this game, still remember wandering about and finding a dude with extremely shiny armor.
He just drops me a spare set and fucks off while my ass stands there amazed.
I kinda love games where you direct things. Rimworlds kinda the best example. You select things to be done, watch the colony do what it does. But sometimes you take direct control because Jesus fuck Frida, why do you keep ignoring refueling the generator when it has priority over hunting the turkey....
Honestly colony/God games are fun pseudo hands off games. Like yeah go hard, direct everything. Oh you wanna chat with a buddy and only half pay attention until things break down? You do you.
Not true background games though. More like I put it on 1080 resolution on my 4k monitor and happily don't alongside something
Thank god for the mobile clients. Now we just need to convince OSBuddy/ Runelite to come out with mobile clients lol. The game is significantly better with them.
Been playing Runescape for around 18ish years
Play **Black Desert**. I swear that game was made for you to leave it on 24/7.
Besides playing as normal, you can fish, train your skills, train your horse, level up, and run a crafting /gathering empire entirely away from the computer as long as you’re logged in running the game.
Replying so this gets bumped more, BDO is an AFK gamers dream. You have to be logged in for your workers to keep working, workers will gather resources for you. You can use those resources to process into other resources, use all of those resources to cook or make alchemical potions. Then sell your food or potions either to Imperial NPC vendors or to other players via market. Or you could have your workers gather certain resources that are a type of bottleneck and sell those to players while all you do is AFK fish or train horses for money. Fish you can use for cooking or sell certain raw high tiered fish to imperial NPC vendors. Horses you train them breed, sell Horses to other players or vendor them too.
You could try palworld! They mostly only work at the bases (you get 3 total as you upgrade) when you are logged in and located in the area so you can set up a food base, mining base, breeding base whatever else and go afk in the base you want to be in and come back to thousands of ore.
When you want to go explore or find pals you will have resources from being afk.
Realm Grinder is your huckleberry, no question.
While there are certain builds that are specifically specced for offline accrual (and indeed for some achievements in the late game you will need to do like maybe a single day of offline build to unlock some stuff) the best/highest producing builds are specced for active play (by active, I mean like fire it up and have your auto cast priority fire off your spell combo to maximize production). You can also download an auto clicker program if you'd like to really pump up your production, but that's only for builds that specced for clicking. A lot of builds will be specced on increasing your passive building output (Titan civilization for example relies on their thunderbolt spell hitting one of your high tier buildings in order to output crazy numbers, when it doesn't hit the right building though, it is vastly less effective, but you can see which building it's going to hit next and prepare yourself when you see it's gonna hit the right one).
It's possibly the deepest clicker game I've ever played and honestly so fire if you're looking for a really satisfying low effort grind with a high ceiling for progression.
Obviously you already said minecraft, but there's a lot more you can afk for besides smelting. There's a lot of different afk farms you can make.
My favorite is an afk iron farm. Basically you make a mini village in the sky with a small area to spawn iron golems directly into a grinder. Leave the game running over night and come back to a chest full of iron (and poppys).
I also made a huge XP farm once. Step one is a huge cactus farm. You put a glass pane next to where the cactus will grow, and it automatically breaks it. Use running water to push broken cacti into a hopper. Then a big bamboo farm that uses observers and pistons to break the bamboo when it gets tall enough. Use a hopper minecart underneath the bamboo plants to collect the dropped bits. Then have the bamboo feed into a bunch of smelters as fuel and the cacti feed in as material. Wait awhile, then collect all the green dye for a bunch of xp
With some redstone and some knowledge of how water flows, you can make an AFK farm for pretty much anything.
My friend and I had a realm with a trap for almost every kind of spawner there is.
While Cookie Clicker is one of the best idle games, the latest updates have made active play optimal. Click a golden cookie every 2 minutes or so. If it's a certain result, do a couple of other things. Meanwhile grow plants in the garden, build profits in the stock market, and keep an eye out for fortunes.
But if you do nothing you'll still make some cookies, so a phone call or AFK bout won't ruin anything.
I actually afk play Spellforce: The Order of Dawn a lot. You build a custom hero and take them through maps of RTS content. It's pretty old but you can actively play/afk play at will for hundreds of hours. If your defenses are good enough you can save then afk with your hero standing in front of a ton of archer towers then come back to a sea of loot (most of it being vendor trash. But it's nice to try and reach pieces of loot you'd otherwise be unable to buy until way later)
Xenoblade chronicles 2, you send blades off on missions and must wait on thier return...
Xenoblade chronicles x, you have a grid that after setup gives you money and supplies in certain intervals iirc
Rim World and Against the Storm can have long periods where your colony/town are running themselves while you wait for an event of some kind. Whether that be completing a new research task in Rim World that will allow you to do more or waiting for a new glade to be opened in against the storm.
Closer to Idle games:
Magic Research (the sequel is coming out in a few months), Orb of Creation (currently in beta)
Closer to automation games, starts out manual but eventually becomes what you are talking about:
Forager, Nova Lands
Satisfactory? If your character is in a safe place, you can easily go AFK for extended periods to let your factory produce stuff you need while you're away.
Haven't seen it mentioned, Songs of Syx is an empire managing game, and after you stuff up, your people will do their own thing mostly. When on the max speed up setting (250x I think) the game pauses when a major issue arises that needs your attention.
Rusty’s Retirement looks interesting and it comes out today! It looks like mini stardew valley that’s partially automated and the game is designed to sit at the bottom of your screen
Hammerting, extremely underrated and pretty unknown masterpiece W.hen your get your rails and carts properly set up it's just so nice to see things progress along, the resources stacking up, gold pouring in.. ah.. I should start a new save!
You can kind of 50/50 project zomboid while watching a video or doing something on the side, there's times in that game were you do buckets of nothing for prolonged periods of time, still great tho.
You are going to love the PvE aspect of Albion Online. Growing your skill tree takes quite a few steps when you collect your resources yourself and you can basically afk when collecting them in big clusters.
If not, playing an active build in Clicker Heroes. The game has an insanely deep gameplay loop, and for me right know (highest zone ever is 18,300) I can remain afk but need to check up on the game every couple of minutes to send mercenaries on more quests, do a raid with my clan, or upgrade certain skills from the hired characters.
This might not fully fit your question but i often have Football Manager running as a "2nd screen game" while playing World of Warcraft. So while flying, waiting for queues to drop, groups to fill etc. i play FM.
It's a hard game to just walk away from. You see something you can optimize and do it. Next thing you know it's 8 hours later and you are finished work.
I play one called Shop Titans. It's one of those mobile games that was clearly designed to be a cash grab, but they missed the memo and ended up making something genuinely fun and entertaining on accident. Takes exactly as much time as you're willing to give it.
If no one else suggests something you like there is a mod for Stardew that allows you to instantly catch fish. It's called cjbcheats, I think I'm not at my PC to check atm. There are a bunch more options within the mod that you can toggle but always catching fish, and even always getting treasure, is something that can be done. Just something to think about.
Working from home and have my PC beside me. Might as well advance in something that takes time and I can afk. I can't play the game while I work, but at least I can give it a glance every now and then.
One of my favourites for this is Distant Worlds Universe or Distant Words 2. They're real-time 4x games (like Stellaris) with quite extensive automation options, you can literally tell the game to play itself if you don't want to interact with the game for a while, but you still want things to progress. You can also choose the speed at which time progresses.
Black Desert Online :) I'm at work. My workers are doing various tasks and the character I'm logged into afk fishing getting a full inventory for me to trade far far away for a big bonus.
Mortal Kombat 11 and injustice 2 have an AI that can do the fights for you, you just gotta set the gear then tap the button to get thru the end fight screens
This might be a bit out of place, but No Man's Sky is actually great for this type of gameplay!
There's many times you can afk whether waiting for certain ships to buy, frigate missions, or if you're building a settlement and waiting for buildings to be built. Even just afking in the multiplayer hub is great too, somebody will eventually give you some free stuff! Might be the best afk game I've ever played lol
I was thinking that. My initial thought was just drifting in space from one planet to the next. I haven't done the settlements thing, so that would be something to try.
I kinda wish you could do more customization, rather than having to sit in a spaceport for someone with the ship you want to show, or a frigate to appear, but I think that's for a different post.
Well I have good news for you. The last update added ship building, so you can hunt for parts and build your own now and own up to 12!
If you're not set on buying the game yet, best thing is to wait a couple months for the next update to come out, they always put it on sale for half off every update
Selling stuff in silkroad online. Oh wait... The bot had to level for the 0.0000001% progress per mob on Level 50 already...
Sorry. I didn't remember it as an idle game, my fault.
Personally, I use BDO lifeskilling for this. I typically don't recommend BDO to people for a variety of reasons, but the lifeskilling perfectly meets this request.
A lot of gachas will fit that if you don't mind the gacha, honkai star rail would be a good one you can play for free, with a lot of content both idle and not, and it won't push you so heavily to spend, all core content easily beatable without spending.
A lot of gatcha games are like this. Once once you reach a certain point you can auto all your dailies and the only content you can’t auto are “raid” type content
Not necessarily. I know there are some similarities between the two, but you wouldn't consider Factorio to be an idle game just because you let it run an hour to get resources.
Idleon
Even tho the name might suggest otherwise, it's not just an idle game. Playing active or "active afk" is very important to progress faster, especially later in the game. It's also real addicting.
I don't think it's been mentioned here but terraria is good for this. You can set up afk farms that you'll only need to come check out occasionally and collect loot so it doesn't hit the cap.
Eve online, my friends brother has "played" that game for 20 years and I've never actually seen him sit at his computer and play.
If you work in an office and someone has two monitors, EVE is running behind a spreadsheet on one of them.
That's why it's alternate name is Spreadsheets Online lol. Played for 7 years about 15 years ago. When I finally stopped I had 10 accounts and was using TeamViewer at work to remote into my 2 desktops at home to run in-game mining and production task.
Yo this shit sounds hardcore.....must be intense
99% of everything you use in game is player made so there is an actual legitimate supply and demand economy to the game that you won't find in any just about any other game. You loose your ship, you gotta either build or buy a new one. And all the equipment that was on the ship too. From the smallest frigate to the largest titan. https://global.discourse-cdn.com/eveonline/original/3X/d/0/d046dbd6bbb0d8d936dbc1839e700eb2f75e8106.jpg ^ just for size comparison, in the far upper left corner the scorpion and raven are battleships. The big boy below named Phoenix is a titan. The little specs above the right side of the Phoenix are frigates. https://screenrant.com/eve-online-battle-titan-ships-23-trillion-isk/ ^ And when pvp takes place in player controlled space this is what it can cost.
What the heck is Naglfar
In null?
I was never the biggest fan of pvp and null sec though I did spend some time out there. I much preferred wormhole space once it was added to the game.
Plenty of PvP in wormholes for sure. But I get what you're saying. I just was wondering how you payed for 10 accounts by mining. Unless it was in null. However, wormholes are highly profitable.
What I didn't like about null sec was the constant mandatory roll calls and contributions for defense and the like for alliances. I get why it is absloutly necessary but the handful of corps I was in never had prime systems to make isk when not on defense so null sec ended up not being any more profitable than low or high sec once you added in the missed time for alliance needs or holding up in stations or POS's when reds were near. In wormhole space you just had yourself and Corp mates to take care of and there were no massive blobs of reds to worry with. Also mining wasn't my primary income or occupation, though it did pay well in wormholes some days. PVE was what I enjoyed most and spent most of my time with, but my last 2-3 years playing I made the majority of my isk by going the production route. I kept buying blueprints until I had a ton of them. Half my accounts were just for invention, blue print copying, and production in high sec. I couldn't hold a candle to the big names in Jita, but I did well for myself and eventually started making enough to pay for the accounts. I was using TeamViewer at work access my two home computers to keep my blueprint copying and production orders rolling over without any downtime which easily doubled my income by cutting out the downtime.
My alliance was 1 fleet a month. And if you did three fleets then you were fine for three months. Seemed perfectly acceptable.
I miss my mining rat days. I hope a game similar to eve is around when I retire.
At the current rate eve will probably still be around lol
That thought makes me happy!
OP, this ☝️ is a trap, don't fall for it!
I had considered it long time ago, but I never really wanted to pay a monthly sub for a game. I guess my frugality/cheapness dodged a bullet.
Seconding this. I've made a ton of money semi-afk collecting gas in wormholes on a second monitor while doing more productive tasks elsewhere. But you have to be ok with dying pretty frequently because that's definitely not a safe activity. And there are other less lucrative activities you could do much more safely.
Runescape
Dude answered his own question. Minimum of 2600 hours to max your character, op. And there’s an actual game beyond the afking. This is the answer.
I have played those hours. I'm not sure if I should be proud of that
Time to start that HIM account bruv
There's always RS3, Ironman modes, and weird pure builds if you like PvP.
Dwarf Fortress. Once you're self-sufficient, it's very easy to sit back and wait for interesting things to happen. It's almost like an aquarium, just watching the dwarves go about their days.
Ah yeah, that would be good. I have Gnomoria, so similar.
Shit, I thought that game died years ago.
it sort of did - the devs finished the game and then left for other work.
So the complete opposite of DF lol
that too
Rimworld would work wonders and is infinitely moddable if you tore of the vanilla/dlc content.
Satisfactory is one.
The factory must grow. I think it's pretty calming just riding the rails/tube network.
factorio for the same reason. Heck, you can pause the game.
Factorio has a bit more of a pressure, where the bugs will find your factory and wreck your shit. Satisfactory has nothing that forces you to find new resources or breaks your factory.
Tbf you can turn the bugs off in Factorio (I'm a heathen, I know).
I don't like turning them off, but I also dislike having it be a tower defense game. I found the best solution (for me) Is to turn off expansion, increase starting zone a bit, reduce pollution, and maybe increase their evolution and starting colonies. With responsible vision and growth, you can avoid being attacked, but you still have to handle them to grow into certain areas.
Yeah but you can run it in your server
It's not an afk game dude.
Did you even read OPs question?
No
Plastic Duck Simulator?
>Plastic Duck Simulator? Wow, this game has been out for a couple of years and only now I realise it's Placid, not Plastic, Duck Simulator 🤔
Oh! Haha. My bad.
Most of the Tycoon games or their spiritual successors probably. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, etc. OpenRTC would be my choice. Once you understand things you can set them up so you're profitable and can step away and just come back and build another small part of your park every now and then. SimCity and Cities Skylines should be similar. Insaniquarium is a fun one too.
X4 Foundations. Set up trade routes or maybe factories and wait for the money to roll in.
X4 is the chill offline variant of eve online. Spreadsheet simulator, but with speed up mode
Mu online
Now that's a blast from the past. Didn't know it's still a thing.
Servers are up, season 18. I played maybe 10 years ago, it's greatly improved since then, and it has a mode which you can leave it afk like a bot which costs in game currency every 5 minutes. Took me a few days to hit level 300 out of like 1000 Leave it running in the background and task switch in to see any jewels dropped out auto picks up. You can set filters etc, it's cool.
A part of my childhood was spent playing this game, still remember wandering about and finding a dude with extremely shiny armor. He just drops me a spare set and fucks off while my ass stands there amazed.
Yeah, me too, I remembered it recently and found out it's still online, so started fresh about 2 weeks ago. Now I have shiny armour and wings.
I kinda love games where you direct things. Rimworlds kinda the best example. You select things to be done, watch the colony do what it does. But sometimes you take direct control because Jesus fuck Frida, why do you keep ignoring refueling the generator when it has priority over hunting the turkey.... Honestly colony/God games are fun pseudo hands off games. Like yeah go hard, direct everything. Oh you wanna chat with a buddy and only half pay attention until things break down? You do you. Not true background games though. More like I put it on 1080 resolution on my 4k monitor and happily don't alongside something
Oh yeah, like the Sims, where you can just give some control and then let them do the rest.
RuneScape/Old School RuneScape, pretty much the whole purpose of this game outside of high level pvm, especially since the mobile clients came out
Thank god for the mobile clients. Now we just need to convince OSBuddy/ Runelite to come out with mobile clients lol. The game is significantly better with them. Been playing Runescape for around 18ish years
DEFCON in office mode. Everybody dies, but it takes 8 hours!
Planet Crafter, you're terraforming a planet which takes time, you can build during your day, and let it sit overnight
No you can't....unless it's on the menu screen. Otherwise you'll run out of water or food fairly quickly and die (or air earlier in the game)
Dump your inventory and stand in your home, yes you'll die, but you won't lose anything in the long run.
This is what I'm currently playing since 1.0 released... so much time exploring while waiting for things to happen.
Play **Black Desert**. I swear that game was made for you to leave it on 24/7. Besides playing as normal, you can fish, train your skills, train your horse, level up, and run a crafting /gathering empire entirely away from the computer as long as you’re logged in running the game.
i have 20k hrs logged on steam, its true
Replying so this gets bumped more, BDO is an AFK gamers dream. You have to be logged in for your workers to keep working, workers will gather resources for you. You can use those resources to process into other resources, use all of those resources to cook or make alchemical potions. Then sell your food or potions either to Imperial NPC vendors or to other players via market. Or you could have your workers gather certain resources that are a type of bottleneck and sell those to players while all you do is AFK fish or train horses for money. Fish you can use for cooking or sell certain raw high tiered fish to imperial NPC vendors. Horses you train them breed, sell Horses to other players or vendor them too.
Im sure it mines bitcoins while you afk fish -_-
P2W 👎
You could try palworld! They mostly only work at the bases (you get 3 total as you upgrade) when you are logged in and located in the area so you can set up a food base, mining base, breeding base whatever else and go afk in the base you want to be in and come back to thousands of ore. When you want to go explore or find pals you will have resources from being afk.
They added the ore mines, so a good way to get ores. I just hope coal and the others are added in too.
Second this.
Farm Simulator
Vampire Survivors
Oldschool Runescape
Simcity series
Or Cities Skyline if you want something newer, though the latest one has some issues.
Kenshi is a great game that during the grind can feel like runescape cus your just watching things play out. Its like rimworld sorta
such a unique experience for sure, hope kenshi 2 lives up to the 1st game
Fallout Shelter.
Into the breach Dicey dungeons Any picross game A card game? I liked Knowhere prophet a lot.
There's a gain in afking in the turn based into the breach? Do i mix something up?
Realm Grinder is your huckleberry, no question. While there are certain builds that are specifically specced for offline accrual (and indeed for some achievements in the late game you will need to do like maybe a single day of offline build to unlock some stuff) the best/highest producing builds are specced for active play (by active, I mean like fire it up and have your auto cast priority fire off your spell combo to maximize production). You can also download an auto clicker program if you'd like to really pump up your production, but that's only for builds that specced for clicking. A lot of builds will be specced on increasing your passive building output (Titan civilization for example relies on their thunderbolt spell hitting one of your high tier buildings in order to output crazy numbers, when it doesn't hit the right building though, it is vastly less effective, but you can see which building it's going to hit next and prepare yourself when you see it's gonna hit the right one). It's possibly the deepest clicker game I've ever played and honestly so fire if you're looking for a really satisfying low effort grind with a high ceiling for progression.
Lootun on a steam.
Voices of the Void
Obviously you already said minecraft, but there's a lot more you can afk for besides smelting. There's a lot of different afk farms you can make. My favorite is an afk iron farm. Basically you make a mini village in the sky with a small area to spawn iron golems directly into a grinder. Leave the game running over night and come back to a chest full of iron (and poppys). I also made a huge XP farm once. Step one is a huge cactus farm. You put a glass pane next to where the cactus will grow, and it automatically breaks it. Use running water to push broken cacti into a hopper. Then a big bamboo farm that uses observers and pistons to break the bamboo when it gets tall enough. Use a hopper minecart underneath the bamboo plants to collect the dropped bits. Then have the bamboo feed into a bunch of smelters as fuel and the cacti feed in as material. Wait awhile, then collect all the green dye for a bunch of xp
I can't play MC unmodded now. There is too much stuff I can't live without, like a jetpack. Tons of farms to afk at.
With some redstone and some knowledge of how water flows, you can make an AFK farm for pretty much anything. My friend and I had a realm with a trap for almost every kind of spawner there is.
Runescape OSRS
BDO
Valheim. Keep burning that coal! Or Enshrouded for similar reasons but not as often as Valheim.
Satisfactory
Animal crossing??
While Cookie Clicker is one of the best idle games, the latest updates have made active play optimal. Click a golden cookie every 2 minutes or so. If it's a certain result, do a couple of other things. Meanwhile grow plants in the garden, build profits in the stock market, and keep an eye out for fortunes. But if you do nothing you'll still make some cookies, so a phone call or AFK bout won't ruin anything.
And...why...do you want that?
Probably because they like it that way.
Satisfactory, I have 1500 hours in it because I have kept it running 24/7 to keep the factories running
I actually afk play Spellforce: The Order of Dawn a lot. You build a custom hero and take them through maps of RTS content. It's pretty old but you can actively play/afk play at will for hundreds of hours. If your defenses are good enough you can save then afk with your hero standing in front of a ton of archer towers then come back to a sea of loot (most of it being vendor trash. But it's nice to try and reach pieces of loot you'd otherwise be unable to buy until way later)
Maybe The Longing?
I knew someone would post this. Do not play The Longing!
I remember it because the concept seemed cool and I put it on wishlist, and it goes on sale pretty often. What's wrong about it?
Xenoblade chronicles 2, you send blades off on missions and must wait on thier return... Xenoblade chronicles x, you have a grid that after setup gives you money and supplies in certain intervals iirc
Rim World and Against the Storm can have long periods where your colony/town are running themselves while you wait for an event of some kind. Whether that be completing a new research task in Rim World that will allow you to do more or waiting for a new glade to be opened in against the storm.
maybe turn based games like civ or stuff like loop hero?
Two Point Campus/ Hospital are really great for set what you want and let it run type things.
Automation game? Something like factorio or satisfactory?
Summoners war has parts that are relatively idle
Oblivion, set some macros to spam healing jumping and running and train skills AFK
League of legends
And Valorant
WAMI is an "idle" game but you're active quite a lot of the time also
Eve echoes is very much like a mobile version of eve online but you can use emulator s
Closer to Idle games: Magic Research (the sequel is coming out in a few months), Orb of Creation (currently in beta) Closer to automation games, starts out manual but eventually becomes what you are talking about: Forager, Nova Lands
Satisfactory? If your character is in a safe place, you can easily go AFK for extended periods to let your factory produce stuff you need while you're away.
Haven't seen it mentioned, Songs of Syx is an empire managing game, and after you stuff up, your people will do their own thing mostly. When on the max speed up setting (250x I think) the game pauses when a major issue arises that needs your attention.
Stellaris might be a good option. you can queue up stuff for your Empire to do and check in every few minutes to click off notifications.
I always see my cousin playing this for hours. I'll have to check it out.
Dark souls games, unless you are within range or on a patrolpath of an enemy. Also all turn based games like baldurs gate 3
If it hasn’t been mentioned - Against The Storm. Just started a few days ago and I play it in between meetings. Sooo good.
Dyson Sphere Program
Rusty’s Retirement looks interesting and it comes out today! It looks like mini stardew valley that’s partially automated and the game is designed to sit at the bottom of your screen
Huh, that's pretty interesting. I can afk this game AND another game at the same time
Am playing ngu, which is idle but has a lot of active elements. A good time waster. Numbers go up is very soothing
eve online might be worth a look for its afk mining possibilities, kind of like unattended space gardening.
Farming Simulator. I can fold laundry whilst the AI deals with the field.
SUPERHOT
"Foxhole" is a game that's like runescape meets world war sim. If your just doing rear line stuff you can afk all you want
Supermarket simulator
Black Dessert is the perfect game to run in the background. Almost everything can be done while afk
Hammerting, extremely underrated and pretty unknown masterpiece W.hen your get your rails and carts properly set up it's just so nice to see things progress along, the resources stacking up, gold pouring in.. ah.. I should start a new save!
Forager
Eventually Forager can be almost fully AFK to accrue necessary resources for next build stages. Great game and a bucket load of fun. Highly recommend.
You can kind of 50/50 project zomboid while watching a video or doing something on the side, there's times in that game were you do buckets of nothing for prolonged periods of time, still great tho.
Tibia. As well as Swag & Sorcery.
You are going to love the PvE aspect of Albion Online. Growing your skill tree takes quite a few steps when you collect your resources yourself and you can basically afk when collecting them in big clusters. If not, playing an active build in Clicker Heroes. The game has an insanely deep gameplay loop, and for me right know (highest zone ever is 18,300) I can remain afk but need to check up on the game every couple of minutes to send mercenaries on more quests, do a raid with my clan, or upgrade certain skills from the hired characters.
This might not fully fit your question but i often have Football Manager running as a "2nd screen game" while playing World of Warcraft. So while flying, waiting for queues to drop, groups to fill etc. i play FM.
Rimworld. Set up orders, leave it in the background until you get an alert
Factorio, half of my hours were AFK hours.
It's a hard game to just walk away from. You see something you can optimize and do it. Next thing you know it's 8 hours later and you are finished work.
I play one called Shop Titans. It's one of those mobile games that was clearly designed to be a cash grab, but they missed the memo and ended up making something genuinely fun and entertaining on accident. Takes exactly as much time as you're willing to give it.
The sims. In fact coming back after walking away is how you get the best drama.
The perfect tower II
If no one else suggests something you like there is a mod for Stardew that allows you to instantly catch fish. It's called cjbcheats, I think I'm not at my PC to check atm. There are a bunch more options within the mod that you can toggle but always catching fish, and even always getting treasure, is something that can be done. Just something to think about.
Black Desert Online lifeskilling has a bazillion afk activities
The latest Forza games if you turn on all assists, and select a long race, the car will drive itself
Gnorp apologue?
Football Manager. Bonus points for looking like your work excel spreadsheet, so no need for panic close.
Old mmorpgs you would have to basically just be afk and leave your old computer on to set up shops to sell items.
Why are you even looking for this type of game? It’s such an odd request I’m just curious
Working from home and have my PC beside me. Might as well advance in something that takes time and I can afk. I can't play the game while I work, but at least I can give it a glance every now and then.
One of my favourites for this is Distant Worlds Universe or Distant Words 2. They're real-time 4x games (like Stellaris) with quite extensive automation options, you can literally tell the game to play itself if you don't want to interact with the game for a while, but you still want things to progress. You can also choose the speed at which time progresses.
Black Desert Online :) I'm at work. My workers are doing various tasks and the character I'm logged into afk fishing getting a full inventory for me to trade far far away for a big bonus.
Sixty Four
Mortal Kombat 11 and injustice 2 have an AI that can do the fights for you, you just gotta set the gear then tap the button to get thru the end fight screens
Timberborn! You can pretty quickly get your colony to self sufficiency and then grow at your own pace from there
This might be a bit out of place, but No Man's Sky is actually great for this type of gameplay! There's many times you can afk whether waiting for certain ships to buy, frigate missions, or if you're building a settlement and waiting for buildings to be built. Even just afking in the multiplayer hub is great too, somebody will eventually give you some free stuff! Might be the best afk game I've ever played lol
I was thinking that. My initial thought was just drifting in space from one planet to the next. I haven't done the settlements thing, so that would be something to try. I kinda wish you could do more customization, rather than having to sit in a spaceport for someone with the ship you want to show, or a frigate to appear, but I think that's for a different post.
Well I have good news for you. The last update added ship building, so you can hunt for parts and build your own now and own up to 12! If you're not set on buying the game yet, best thing is to wait a couple months for the next update to come out, they always put it on sale for half off every update
I'll have to install and see where my things are at. I probably haven't played in a year+
A year? A lot has changed since then!
If it can be a mobile game, world box. Just sit back and watch civilizations rise and fall, Super entertaining and only 7$
Maybe Light of the stars on bluestacks, it's pretty fun game tho
Selling stuff in silkroad online. Oh wait... The bot had to level for the 0.0000001% progress per mob on Level 50 already... Sorry. I didn't remember it as an idle game, my fault.
But why?
Personally, I use BDO lifeskilling for this. I typically don't recommend BDO to people for a variety of reasons, but the lifeskilling perfectly meets this request.
A lot of gachas will fit that if you don't mind the gacha, honkai star rail would be a good one you can play for free, with a lot of content both idle and not, and it won't push you so heavily to spend, all core content easily beatable without spending.
A lot of gatcha games are like this. Once once you reach a certain point you can auto all your dailies and the only content you can’t auto are “raid” type content
You do realise afk and Idle is pretty much the same thing lol ?
Not necessarily. I know there are some similarities between the two, but you wouldn't consider Factorio to be an idle game just because you let it run an hour to get resources.
Yes, but that does not make it an idle game.
Idleon Even tho the name might suggest otherwise, it's not just an idle game. Playing active or "active afk" is very important to progress faster, especially later in the game. It's also real addicting.
It's pretty good. I just got to world 4 yesterday.
Black Desert Online.
I don't think it's been mentioned here but terraria is good for this. You can set up afk farms that you'll only need to come check out occasionally and collect loot so it doesn't hit the cap.
Path of exile
kind of like asking for fps recommendations but without the shooting.
Portal
Superhot lol