The 13 best co-op management games to sink hours and hours into

polygon.com:

Base-building and management simulator games scratch a particular itch. There’s that perfect gameplay loop that comes from doing menial tasks and then, later, building systems to help automate those chores. But these games are often more fun with others, letting you create abominations together or ruthlessly mess with each other’s work.

So we’ve created a list of some of our favorites that support cooperative play; mostly online multiplayer with a few entries that support couch co-op. This list broadly covers base-building, automation, survival, and certain types of crafting games. What they share in common is a particular game loop, with resource gathering and crafting complementary to other goals — from exploration and fighting to growing a city to managing a successful amusement park or farm.

This list focuses on official, developer-backed multiplayer modes. Even if your favorite doesn’t make an appearance, many popular colony management sims (like Rimworld, for example) have multiplayer mods.

Terraria is the 2D sandbox survival game to end all 2D sandbox survival games. You could easily burn hundreds of hours simply exploring and building, even without explicitly attempting to fight the game’s numerous enemies. It has everything: exploration in an absolutely massive procedurally generated map, crafting and base-building, and so, so many bats. Build your base, seek upgrades, and fight bosses to advance the game’s story.

Online multiplayer supports up to eight players, with some older console editions offering four-player split-screen co-op. (Developer Re-Logic first released the game on PC in 2011; it has been ported to its fair share of platforms since.) The Nintendo Switch version also supports two-player couch