There is even a Star Trek-ish game where you have to produce to earn money to upgrade the ship for your crew. I get that it is a game mechanic, but seems like a perfect setting to not have money, and just concentrate on the people.
I feel like the best you could possibly find is a game that uses a resource as payment that isn’t called “money,” but mechanically it would be the same.
But there is Minecraft. You can farm in that and you don’t need money (even though it exists in the form mentioned above). Or Project Zomboid which money exists as money but is only useful as toilet paper.
It’s an extremely bizarre suggestion given your request. I do want to defend the game (though not the suggestion) a little though.
It initially presents as you say, but offers you opportunities to fight back in your capacity as border control. Letting in the right people can help the resistance and incite a coup, or enable you and your families escape from the country. It isn’t just Be A Good Tankie Simulator 2013, though you can play it that way too.
I long for a moneyless, classless game in this genre where the incentives are community thriving, trust, pleasure, and all the other aspects that make life worth worth living outside of capitalism.
I think Sim Ant technically meets these conditions.
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles … but with the caveats that a) it’s only PARTLY like stardew/portia/harvestmoon and b) For the life of me I can’t remember if the game had money or not.
The game is partly farm-life-sim, but the other part is “zelda-like” adventuring and getting rid of “dark smoke thing” that does bad things to the world.
It has a barter system, but you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. Nearly everything you need in the game can be harvested or made.
Their other game, Grow: Song of the Evertree, is pretty fun too. It’s partly a city builder, partly exploring new worlds that you create. It’s been a while since I played it, so I remember some sort of currency, but I don’t really remember having to work that hard for it. Mostly, I just focused on creating worlds with crazy elements.
Grow: Song of the Evertree has lots of crafting materials, but no money. I haven’t played it much, but it mostly seems to be about gathering daily to grow the Evertree, then using the resources to expand the town.
Or kill it completely. The only reason I’ve held off signing this is that the wording is so vague that it could work in favor of gaming companies. I’d rather not see that.
It’s not supposed to be a finished law at this point. The main take from the initiative is that digital games have a massive issue with anti-consumer practices, and that consumers demand something to be done about it.
Companies can completely erase the idea of ownership. If everything is subscription-based, they can simply stop the subscription and have no further obligations.
Or Europe just gets completely locked out of functionality, as already happens in some European countries.
Of course good things can come from this, but I’ve read here several times that this just isn’t a good proposition and might just lead to the anti-consumer practices disappearing in a negative way too.
EU is way too large of a market to “lock out.” Didn’t happen with Apple, for example.
For subscription hell, we’re deeper into it than is healthy, but I don’t expect it to take over because of this. Steam, which is the biggest, most profitable platform out there doesn’t even offer a subscription and shouldn’t be hurt by this. For competitors, trying to suddenly force everyone into a subscription would lose a lot of business.
Edit: Anyway, doing nothing about it is a guaranteed bad outcome.
The first games that popped into my head were Forager and Outpath, though these arent so much community building type games. They are more just something cute to relax to. They have farming and resource collecting and honestly play more like an active idler game than anything. Another game ive sunk tons of time into that kinda meets your requirements is Banished. Its just a medieval city builder game but it is deceptively hard to get a good balanced town going which can be pretty rewarding in itself. Theres no money per se but you do have to manage resources. Theres bartering in the game but you use your resources like crops and stone and stuff.
It’s also great without mods. During my first playthrough, a tornado destroyed most of the village, including the school with every child in it. Up until that point, nobody had died. All livestock, all crops, every single house was gone. The only thing that saved the survivors just before the next winter was some fruit I had stored in the dock for future trade. I managed to get them through the following winter and they all lived to die from old age, but the village never recovered from losing the entire next generation. I was only able to stabilize the population; growth ended up being impossible after this disaster.
I love games that are able to organically create stories like this one.
A UK petition is in the works. It might take some time until that goes up because your election a couple of months ago reset a lot of work, but it’s comming
You may be interested in Aska. It asks the question “what if valheim was also a colony sim?”. It’s a bit less chill then Stardew/Portia, but it is a classless, moneyless community building game.
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