The best open-world games focus on making it enjoyable to move around their worlds. While many let you customize land vehicles, it’s rarer to find games that let you build and customize boats or spaceships. But a few truly exceptional open-world titles allow you to do just that, letting you explore the seas or venture into space with a unique vehicle you’ve created.
Ship customization varies greatly between games. Some offer basic options, letting players personalize their vessels to a degree, while others provide extensive, modular systems that allow for complete control over a ship’s design. Let’s look at both approaches.
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8. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag
A Classic In The Franchise And Among Pirate Games
True open-world pirate games are rare, but Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is a standout success, surprisingly coming from the Assassin’s Creed series. It brilliantly captures the excitement of piracy during the colonial era and continues to be a fan favorite. A big part of its appeal is that it avoids the ongoing service models and loot-focused gameplay found in later games, and it features incredibly detailed ship customization.
This game doesn’t have you building a ship piece by piece, but your main ship is very customizable. You can change how it looks and add upgrades that make piracy easier and more effective. It’s really rewarding to see those improvements come to life on a fully detailed ship sailing the open sea.
7. Skull And Bones
Players Can Put All Their Resources Into Shipbuilding
Even though it hasn’t been a huge hit with everyone, Skull and Bones offers a surprisingly deep ship-building experience. What sets it apart from similar games is its modular customization – players can modify their ships using blueprints to add defenses, change the ship’s appearance, or even add entirely new sections, much like in Starfield. This allows for a lot of experimentation and personalization.
Players can customize their ship with wood and bronze, choosing between a heavily armored ramming vessel designed to destroy enemy ships, or a fast, agile ship built for dodging and outmaneuvering opponents. Ultimately, the best choice depends on how players prefer to navigate and fight.
To be honest, Skull and Bones isn’t a great game overall, but it really stands out with its incredibly detailed ship customization options. That’s the main reason we’re covering it, though it’s probably not worth playing just for that feature.
6. No Man’s Sky
Build A Ship That Meets Your Needs
After a rocky start, No Man’s Sky has become one of the most impressive open-world games available. Over the past ten years, constant updates have dramatically improved the game, and while it initially set a trend of releasing unfinished games, it’s ultimately delivered a unique and expansive space exploration experience for players.
Ship building has been significantly improved, giving players tons of options to customize their vessels. Now you can create specialized ships for any purpose – from long-range explorers and fast fighters to huge cargo carriers, or anything else you can dream up.
5. Starfield
Taking Bethesda Game Design To The Stars
Bethesda’s space RPG, Starfield, received mixed reactions, but it’s still being played. Its upcoming release on PlayStation 5 in April 2026 could bring the game back into the spotlight. Many players enjoy the quiet, atmospheric moments of exploring space in their own customized ship. Building and designing ships is straightforward, yet allows for a lot of creative freedom.
Highly skilled pilots will be able to build massive freighters – or incredibly fast, streamlined ships – with very few limitations. The ship-building system is designed to reward effort, meaning the more time and creativity players invest, the better their ships will be.
4. Starcom: Unknown Space
A Smaller Open World Title With A Lot To Offer
Starcom: Unknown Space has a really unique ship-building system based on tiles. It’s possibly the most customizable on this list. Whether you want to carefully design a specialized ship or just build a massive, powerful vessel to obliterate your foes, this game lets you do it.
You can easily get lost in exploring, completing tasks, trading, and building relationships with different groups in this game, often more so than following the main storyline. Each universe is uniquely created, offering a lot to discover.
3. Spiritfarer
A Wistful And Highly Entertaining Game
This charming game lets you build a boat and guide spirits to their final resting place. It’s a touching experience that helps both the spirits in the game and the player find peace with loss and acceptance.
What makes building ships in this game unique is the ability to create incredibly tall vessels. Instead of making ships wider, players focus on building upwards, transforming a tiny boat into a massive, towering structure where lost souls can finally rest.
2. Raft
Many games let you build ships to travel further and more safely, but ship-building is usually just a way to get around. Raft is different. Although you build a raft to explore the ocean, it’s more like a floating home than a simple vehicle.
Players begin by gathering simple materials like plastic and wood to build a small, basic raft. As they play, they’ll collect more resources, allowing them to expand and eventually create large, multi-level floating homes. At first, steering the raft is difficult, but players unlock better controls as they progress. What makes Raft so good is that it’s easy to learn, but offers a lot of depth and opportunities for improvement as you play.
1. Space Engineers
The Ultimate Space Voxel Sandbox
It’s easy to compare Space Engineers to Minecraft, but instead of building on land, you’re building in space. The gameplay revolves around constructing everything from small fighters to huge spaceships, piece by piece. There are two grid sizes to accommodate different scales of building. If you can envision it, you can likely build it – the game offers incredible creative freedom.
Space Engineers isn’t just about how things look; every block you place actually does something. You build a ship’s systems by connecting blocks together, and it all has to work logically. For example, a machine gun won’t fire unless it’s linked to a supply of ammunition using a conveyor belt – you can’t simply bolt it onto the ship and expect it to function.
Okay, so Space Engineers is definitely not easy. It can be super overwhelming at first, but honestly, if you stick with it and put in the time, it’s incredibly rewarding. It’s one of those games where the effort really pays off.
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2026-04-03 21:06