Best Open-World Games With Deep Housing & Home-Decor Customization

When people think about housing or decorating in video games, they often picture relaxing games like Stardew Valley or The Sims. But increasingly, many games across all genres – not just life simulators or crafting games – are adding these features as a key part of the gameplay, or at least as something players can choose to do.

If you’re a designer or architect looking for creative outlets in gaming, several titles stand out for their impressive housing and decoration features. These games are particularly immersive because they let you build and design in expansive, open worlds. We’ve chosen the following games based on how detailed their building options are and how much freedom they give you to create the home of your dreams.

The Sims 3

Create And Decorate To Your Heart’s Content

While The Sims 3 is an older game, it still has some advantages over The Sims 4. Its biggest strength is its fully open world, featuring large and explorable neighborhoods where you can build anything you imagine, and even customize the worlds themselves. Plus, it offers robust design tools, including a color wheel and a huge variety of patterns and textures, letting you personalize every piece of furniture in the game.

This game is famous for its incredibly robust building system. It might take some getting used to, but once you learn the ropes, you can build almost anything you imagine. Having more expansion packs definitely helps, as they unlock tons of extra building materials like walls, floors, and roofs for designing your dream homes. And if you’re feeling extra creative, you can even download custom content to take your builds to the next level.

Fallout 4

Build Homes For Settlers And Yourself In The Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

If you’re like me and craving something a little more hardcore, with a focus on building and surviving, the settlement stuff in Fallout 4 is seriously addictive. You’ll need to follow the Minutemen quests to unlock it, but once you do, get ready to spend hours building up settlements all over the Commonwealth. It’s all about making sure everyone has a safe place to live, enough food and water, and keeping those settlers happy – it’s a surprisingly deep system!

Eventually, you can even start earning resources from your settlements. To expand and improve them, though, you’ll need to venture out into the world and gather junk and scrap. Don’t worry, there are plenty of options to customize how your settlements look – you can make them as quirky or high-tech as you like. And, like with other Bethesda games, a strong modding community will provide even more ways to build and manage your settlements.

Minecraft

Creative Mode Is A Builder’s And Decorator’s Dream

Minecraft is often called the perfect sandbox game, and it lives up to the hype. You can jump into creative mode for unlimited resources and instant access to every building block, letting you build amazing structures right away. If you enjoy a good challenge, survival mode lets you gather everything yourself. Since everything in Minecraft is made of blocks, you’ll need to use your imagination to build houses that look realistic.

Over the years, the game has added many more ways to decorate, including candles, flowers, pots, paintings, and carpets. Players can choose from a huge range of colors and materials like wood, wool, and terracotta, making it a dream for builders. The open-world design lets you build almost anywhere, with a dozen different landscapes and three dimensions to explore. Plus, like previous versions, there’s a thriving modding community, with mods that add fully functional furniture like chairs, refrigerators, and stoves.

Valheim

Viking Themed Builder’s Paradise

If you love playing Minecraft, then Valheim offers a similar experience, but set in a world inspired by Norse and Viking mythology. You’ll explore a huge, open world with diverse environments – from towering mountains to lush meadows – and build and decorate everything in a classic Viking style. It’s ideal for anyone who enjoys the medieval aesthetic and loves crafting cozy, rustic settlements.

The game offers a lot of different decorations and things to build, but you’ll need to find the recipes first. You can create items that really fit the Viking theme, like a maypole, or add some fun, unexpected touches with things like hot tubs and lava lamps. If you’re feeling creative, you can even build things the game doesn’t directly offer – like flower pots or cabinets using walls and stands. Even without mods, Valheim has almost limitless options for designing and decorating your home.

No Man’s Sky

The Ultimate Sci-Fi Build And Decoration Heaven

If you’re not a fan of games set in the Middle Ages, No Man’s Sky offers a refreshing alternative. It features an incredibly expansive open world, perfect for exploration, and provides plenty of amazing locations to build a base. Players aren’t limited to just one base either – you can create multiple, increasingly elaborate ones as you unlock more building options like tunnels, doors, and rooms.

I love that you can customize how these look with different colors and patterns. The options aren’t endless, but you can really get creative and build some wacky stuff, especially when you’re just placing things wherever you want. Plus, the difficulty settings are awesome – I can make building my dream home super easy or a real challenge, depending on my mood.

Dragon Quest Builders 2

Cutesy Block-Based House Building

Fans of Minecraft will notice similarities in the look and feel of Dragon Quest Builders 2, but this game adds a full role-playing experience and a delightful story. You’ll work with the friendly people of a charming open world to rebuild their homes, and you can create amazing structures as you unlock new designs.

Each room will have specific needs or require certain items to be comfortable for those living there. There’s a huge range of decorations to choose from – things like flowers, curtains, carpets, and wall lights – plus lots of different building blocks that let you customize textures and colors. Just like many other games, clever placement of items can add even more variety and creativity to your designs.

inZOI

Visually Stunning And Highly Realistic Housing And Decoration

Even though it’s still under development and not fully complete, inZOI is a promising new game that’s already making waves in the life simulation genre, traditionally dominated by The Sims. It does require a powerful computer to run with all its features, but the incredible level of detail and customization options in build mode make it well worth the investment.

Like in The Sims 3, you can customize furniture with a full range of colors. But it goes further than that! The game’s AI lets you create almost any pattern you can think of, and you can even upload photos to turn them into 3D objects. While these features aren’t flawless, players are already making incredible things with them, as showcased on the inZOI Canvas site.

2025-12-10 08:35