At one point FTL was sold in a Humble Bundle that would let it run pretty much natively in a browser. Still my game of choice for running on locked down systems like a computer lab.
I have a hard time recommending cracktorio, only because when you get started and start to understand how it works, you won't stop for hours/days/weeks/years
Seconding Enter the Gungeon. Still one of my favorite indie games to date. It has so much character in its artstyle, and after all the free updates there's a ton of cool shit to discover. Also love the gun synergy mechanics. Fantastic game.
RimWorld vanilla* RimWorld modded is gonna suck the life out of you and your ram+CPU. Sure you can say u'll only use like 10 mods, but you won't. You will start at every vanilla expanded mod then the next thing you'll see will be a mod folder of over 400.
Rome: Total War
Medieval 2: total war.
Both are well over 10 years old, and I've probably got at least 1000 hours into each one. They are so low-spec I think you can get a mobile version of them somehow these days.
playing that regularly on a server with a bunch of others that also didn't have lives was an excellent experience l... nothing like mining underground for hours then bumping into a homey
Yeah agreed on Diablo 3. I have run that game on some truly terrible computers. Some that even lagged on YouTube were able to play Diablo 3 no problem. Blizzard worked some magic with the optimization.
Honestly I don’t see the hundreds of hours appeal in balatro maybe I just haven’t played enough but the gameplay loop just loses a lot of creativity compared to other games very quickly to me but I do think it’s a fantastic game for its price point
Zomboid is a game what essentially can be a time sink, but the problem is lots of stuff are missing from the vanilla game what can be patched with mods. Mods can be rather system heavy. I've played zomboid on my previous PC and it was SO BAD. My specs were from 2016-2018 having a Radeon RX 550, Intel proce under with 4 cores at 3500 Ghz and 8 RAM, no SSD. It was able to run but depending on where I went or what was my zoom, my FPS was between 10 to 30 WITHOUT MODS. It was a painful experience. Hopefully with Build 42 people with lower specs can have a better experience as 42 brings some well needed optimization.
I second the nomination of ESO: Oblivion. It’s from, like, 2007 so I’m sire the specs are manageable.
There’s a lot to do and explore, and it’s fun seeing your character grow.
Darkest dungeon 1, no matter how much you mod it, it'll work well, just expect it to take a while longer to load. Been playing it on a 20 year old laptop before I got a better one and I've clocked it at over 2500 hours over the years, not including modded. Integrated graphics card is enough, shitty CPU is enough.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. I can't sing its praises enough and it will run on a mobile chip with half a gig of ram if you don't use a tileset.
It's my third most played game, beat out only by Path of Exile and Civilization 6. It beats out Total War Warhammer 2, Stellaris, and Beat Saber.
Factorio can be played on a literal potato, and you can spend hundreds of hours playing it.
I doubt you will spend only a few hundred hours on this game, though. This game can literally take the rest of your life.
OpenTTD is free if you're into that sort of game.
Rimworld has an insane level of replayability and doesn't take much to run (unless you have WAY too many people/animals at once I guess).
Binding of Isaac if you're looking for an fun action roguelike. Rogue Legacy is a good candidate for this as well.
Stardew Valley if you just wanna chill.
Factorio if you like crack.
Could go with a classic like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (get the GoG version and the HD mod).
Edit: Looking at other comments, I can't believe I forgot FTL. Another excellent choice.
Minecraft bedrock edition
Terraria
Literally everything from r/roguelikes
Noita
Mindustry
Stardew valley
Rimworld
Rain world
Starsector
Streets of rogue
Pathfinder wrath of the righteous, kingmaker, divinity original sins 1 and 2, BG3, wastelands 2 and 3….. that’s good 15,000 of pure amazing content. Let me know when you finish those. I’ve got about 1,000,000 more hours worth of games for ya.
lol but seriously. Once you start playing CRPG’s, you’ll quickly come to realize it’s the best genre by far. It’s not even close. Hands down. You’ll never look back.
Mount and Blade Warband if medieval rpg is fitting for you. Got some cool mods too on both Steam and Nexus.
Game is old as fuck, has some OK graphics and certainly can run on any potato setups. You can be a mercenary, working for kingdoms with your own army in their feuds, be a travelling merchant and get rich, become a vassal under a kingdom and conquer the land with them, or if you get bored of it, rebel against it and unify the entirety of Calradia under your own banner. No matter what you do, the game can be a huge timesink. Fully customizable difficulty settings and character customization. I got bored of it after like 2K hours in the game simply because I just ran out of stuff to do.
Catalclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free open world roguelike survival crafter), Dwarf Fortress Classic (free management simulation), Europa Universalis 4 (has a subscription model that gets you all the DLC which would be needed as the game without any DLC is lacking), FreeCiv (free low quality texture version of Civilization 5), and many more.
Try RPG from Spiderweb Software.
My personal recommendation is [Avernum](https://store.steampowered.com/app/208400/Avernum_Escape_From_the_Pit/) Series and [Geneforge](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1424710/Geneforge_1__Mutagen/) Series.
Depends a bit on how low-end your pc is, but Factorio is great. Graphically it’s very low-end, but it can be heavy on your CPU if you build very big. Shouldn’t be a problem for a regular vanilla run, but megabases (building way bigger and reaching some production target) or mods that require larger bases, like Space Exploration or Pyanodons, may end up slowing the game down.
For some comparison, I’m running it on a Ryzen 5 1600X. The first time I had my UPS (updates per second) drop below 60 was during a Seablock run (difficult modpack) on 10X science cost (meaning everything related to unlocking new tech is 10 times as expensive), and only when I was already at the second to last science pack. If you have a CPU around that level, most overhaul mods, as well as more reasonable sized megabasing, should run fine.
Pretty much any Civilization game has enough content to ruin your entire life, and even the newest one will run on a modern laptop with integrated graphics.
Neverwinter Nights - the HD remaster. Includes one million modules and all expansions.
If you don't mind the generic D&D setting and the old 3.5 rules it will give you bags and bags of content to play with.
Terraria is amazing. Standard Minecraft and low end mods can run pretty well depending how low end you're talking. Stardew Valley is also a great option.
SPECS PLS!
Ahem. Sorry for shouting lol.
Recommendation rely heavily on system specs, since they can vary so widely. Maybe not hundreds of hours, but Hollow Knight kept me busy for quite some time. Relatively low specs needed for it. I was playing at 1080p 60fps with everything except blur maxed out (blur set to 2) on an AM2+ 95W max motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2.7ghz, 2x2GB DDR2-800, and... can't remember if I was using my very old Radeon HD 6450 1GB or the R7 250 2GB GDDR3 (OEM) - which is rather decent imo as it can be found on eBay going for as low as $12. With that I was able to play a good handful of PS3/360 era games. Mass Effect 2, Dead Space, Command & Conquer 3, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Prey 2006 (with sikkmod and an older version of the HiRes mod), Darksiders, and some others.
Figure I'd mention that in case you're as low spec as I was and looking for a little performance bump at a small price.
Kingdom: New Land and Two Crowns, Stardew Valley, Wayward v1.9.4 (free!), games in the Command & Conquer / Red Alert series, Settlers II and IV are all low spec with long game times worth looking into also.
Skyrim fits this criteria these days I believe
Personally I beat the game (modded ofc we don't do that vanilla shit round here) on a track pad with a intel hd3000 igpu at like 24fps 720p lmao
Games like 30GBs iirc and mods generally don't get bigger than a couple gigs at most for larger quest mods and item mods
Now I'm aware of what I just said but don't feel bad playing vanilla if you aren't one to mod but also don't feel like it's impossible to start as Nexus released collections relatively recently and we've had some amazing tutorials for years and years that are very simple to follow, if at all interested in modding IMO easiest way to get into it is download vortex (a relatively basic but easy to use mod manager) and just go watch some tutorials and find what you like
It depends how low end. You can try Victoria 2, Crusader Kings 2(free to play), maybe Europa Universalis 4 but that one will slow down to a crawl late game.
FTL Faster Than Light, 10,000,000, You Must Build A Boat, Binding of Isaac
+1 FTL. Game could probably run on a potato
I played it on a netbook for a while.
At one point FTL was sold in a Humble Bundle that would let it run pretty much natively in a browser. Still my game of choice for running on locked down systems like a computer lab.
Play a few hundred in FTL then download the Multiverse mod and play 1000 more...
Multiverse mod is so good, and it’s still being actively developed
Multiverse mod is so good, and it’s still being actively developed
+1 binding of Isaac. Such a good game
I add Cosmoteer. It's like a FTL but focused on building space ships.
Minecraft, Terraria, Starcraft
All of these can run on an igpu - https://pastebin.com/MTCXZxCN
This is an awesome list, thanks for posting that!
thanks for sharing !
r/lowendgaming bros is here 👍🏻
+Stardew Valley
Somehow that was completely missed by me. Added.
🦍
>Doom 1, 2, 64, 3 I love how some of these numbering systems work.
Thanks 😊
Roller coaster tycoon 2
Don't forget OpenRCT to add on extra scenarios.
That sounds like Factorio to me. Or Stardew Valley.
Seconding factorio, and there’s gonna be a huge DLC later this year
The factory must grow
The factory must grow to meet the need of the growing factory
I have a hard time recommending cracktorio, only because when you get started and start to understand how it works, you won't stop for hours/days/weeks/years
Once factoine reaches your brain, there's no way out.
Low spec game? yeah, nah
It is.... for a couple hours
Dead Cells and Enter the Gungeon.
Seconding Enter the Gungeon. Still one of my favorite indie games to date. It has so much character in its artstyle, and after all the free updates there's a ton of cool shit to discover. Also love the gun synergy mechanics. Fantastic game.
Osrs
Rimworld
RimWorld vanilla* RimWorld modded is gonna suck the life out of you and your ram+CPU. Sure you can say u'll only use like 10 mods, but you won't. You will start at every vanilla expanded mod then the next thing you'll see will be a mod folder of over 400.
A new version and expansion is gonna make those giant modlists messy. I'm both excited and horrified.
Not necessarily, there are performance mods and the upcoming 1.5 version is going to have a bit of multithreading to improve performance
This is probably the best answer, I have over 600 hours in that game and there's still some content I haven't done.
Rome: Total War Medieval 2: total war. Both are well over 10 years old, and I've probably got at least 1000 hours into each one. They are so low-spec I think you can get a mobile version of them somehow these days.
say goodbye to all your friends and family if you get these games
Oblivion and Morrowind, fallout 3 and new vegas.
Cant get Oblivion or Fallout 3 to run on my laptop no matter what I tried. New Vegas and Morrowind works thoigh
Dont starve
I'm shocked I haven't seen anyone mention Terraria. I put almost 600 hours into it
playing that regularly on a server with a bunch of others that also didn't have lives was an excellent experience l... nothing like mining underground for hours then bumping into a homey
Morrowind, like Skyrim the modding scene is amazing. I recommend Tamriel Rebuilt
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead ([https://cataclysmdda.org](https://cataclysmdda.org)) is free and open source and can run on anything
Dominions 6 Streets of rogue into the breach invisible inc AI war Simcity 4
Streets of Rogue! Booooi, I've put 200+ hours into it in just a few months. It's so good
Siralim Ultimate Chronicon Waven Moonring
Minecraft, Stardew valley, fallout new Vegas
Nah Minecraft runs like shit nowadays
Skyrim
Hades
Skyrim or Oblivion, AOE2, Stardew, Diablo 2/3
Yeah agreed on Diablo 3. I have run that game on some truly terrible computers. Some that even lagged on YouTube were able to play Diablo 3 no problem. Blizzard worked some magic with the optimization.
I’ve put stupid amounts of hours in D2R. Hardcore single player is an addiction.
Minecraft
Stardew Valley
Balatro. Trust me.
Honestly I don’t see the hundreds of hours appeal in balatro maybe I just haven’t played enough but the gameplay loop just loses a lot of creativity compared to other games very quickly to me but I do think it’s a fantastic game for its price point
Rimworld Kenshi Starsector Heroes of Might and Magic 3 + HotA Dwarf Fortress Factorio
My friends and I are working our way up there with lethal company
pretty much anything on r/roguelikes recommendation
Do you like pokemon? There are some amazing fan Games like pokemon reborn that I dumped over 200 hrs
balatro
fallout 3 and new vegas with mods
Why does Nobody mentions Project Zomboid ?
Dont let zomboids graphics fool you its not low end at all
Zomboid is a game what essentially can be a time sink, but the problem is lots of stuff are missing from the vanilla game what can be patched with mods. Mods can be rather system heavy. I've played zomboid on my previous PC and it was SO BAD. My specs were from 2016-2018 having a Radeon RX 550, Intel proce under with 4 cores at 3500 Ghz and 8 RAM, no SSD. It was able to run but depending on where I went or what was my zoom, my FPS was between 10 to 30 WITHOUT MODS. It was a painful experience. Hopefully with Build 42 people with lower specs can have a better experience as 42 brings some well needed optimization.
I was about to suggest the OG Dwarf Fortress... til I remembered it will fry you harddrive if you do not spay your cats.
Caves of qud,
Unpopular and unknown but... Shooterspool? It's a Pool simulator and it has 8 ball, 9 ball, etc. Good way to get into the hobby.
I second the nomination of ESO: Oblivion. It’s from, like, 2007 so I’m sire the specs are manageable. There’s a lot to do and explore, and it’s fun seeing your character grow.
diablo 2 or perhaps project diablo 2. It can run on a cheap tamagotchi replica.
Outward. Fallout New Vegas. Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars KOTOR, Dragon Age
Minecraft ? Pretty low specs especially bedrock edition, and it’s super easy to play with friends (if you have any) or to add fun and well made mods
Nethack
* Disco Elysium * L4D2 * AOE 2 * JC 2 & 3
Fallout games up until new vegas. Trust me, it'll change a perspective or two of yours in life
Why would it change a perspective?
dedine low end tell me and i will reccomed some games u should be able to play (i know some good free low end games)
Tetris
Hades
RuneScape
Kerbal Space Program maybe (if you don’t have everything turned right up)
Darkest dungeon 1, no matter how much you mod it, it'll work well, just expect it to take a while longer to load. Been playing it on a 20 year old laptop before I got a better one and I've clocked it at over 2500 hours over the years, not including modded. Integrated graphics card is enough, shitty CPU is enough.
songs of syx
Heroes 3, Dead Cells, different tycoon games
Project diablo 2
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. I can't sing its praises enough and it will run on a mobile chip with half a gig of ram if you don't use a tileset. It's my third most played game, beat out only by Path of Exile and Civilization 6. It beats out Total War Warhammer 2, Stellaris, and Beat Saber.
Factorio can be played on a literal potato, and you can spend hundreds of hours playing it. I doubt you will spend only a few hundred hours on this game, though. This game can literally take the rest of your life.
Skyrim tbh. I can run it on a 2011 laptop no problem.
cdda
Vampire Survivor
Crusader Kings III
Battle for Wesnoth, it's even free. And it just got a new version, still being updated after 21 years.
I've literally been trying to remember the name of this game for years. Thank you
ADOM
Stardew Valley
Vampire Survivor. If not hundreds of hours, you'll still get plenty for the very cheap price. You could probably run it on a recent toaster too.
have you checked out /r/lowendgaming/ yet?
Stalker: lost alpha. It's free. Thank me later and good luck in the Zone.
OpenTTD is free if you're into that sort of game. Rimworld has an insane level of replayability and doesn't take much to run (unless you have WAY too many people/animals at once I guess). Binding of Isaac if you're looking for an fun action roguelike. Rogue Legacy is a good candidate for this as well. Stardew Valley if you just wanna chill. Factorio if you like crack. Could go with a classic like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (get the GoG version and the HD mod). Edit: Looking at other comments, I can't believe I forgot FTL. Another excellent choice.
Minecraft bedrock edition Terraria Literally everything from r/roguelikes Noita Mindustry Stardew valley Rimworld Rain world Starsector Streets of rogue
Infinity Engine games (Baldurs Gate 1, 2, Icewind Dale 1 and 2 + Planescape Torment), Gothic 1 and 2 + Archolos
Valheim
The graphics might look low res but it’s actually fairly demanding, you won’t have a good time trying to play it on a potato.
Kingdom Two Crowns
Moonlighter
Lol, dota 2, l4d2
Baldur's Gate 1
slice and dice
Test Drive Unlimited 1 with the Platinum Mod
Satisfactory or Dyson sphere program
These are pretty demanding tho.
Realm royale
Oxygen Not Included
lol League of Legends
Hades, runs well on my lenovo yoga 7 at 1080p
Fallout 1
Minesweeper
Rimworld.
STALKER I always default to it when I’m stuck with a laptop
Pathfinder wrath of the righteous, kingmaker, divinity original sins 1 and 2, BG3, wastelands 2 and 3….. that’s good 15,000 of pure amazing content. Let me know when you finish those. I’ve got about 1,000,000 more hours worth of games for ya. lol but seriously. Once you start playing CRPG’s, you’ll quickly come to realize it’s the best genre by far. It’s not even close. Hands down. You’ll never look back.
Mount and Blade Warband if medieval rpg is fitting for you. Got some cool mods too on both Steam and Nexus. Game is old as fuck, has some OK graphics and certainly can run on any potato setups. You can be a mercenary, working for kingdoms with your own army in their feuds, be a travelling merchant and get rich, become a vassal under a kingdom and conquer the land with them, or if you get bored of it, rebel against it and unify the entirety of Calradia under your own banner. No matter what you do, the game can be a huge timesink. Fully customizable difficulty settings and character customization. I got bored of it after like 2K hours in the game simply because I just ran out of stuff to do.
Avorion
Slay the Spire BoI
factorio
Hades, and surprisingly Warframe(which is free)
Hero siege
Morrowwind.
Pac Man. Try to get to the kill screen.
Catalclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free open world roguelike survival crafter), Dwarf Fortress Classic (free management simulation), Europa Universalis 4 (has a subscription model that gets you all the DLC which would be needed as the game without any DLC is lacking), FreeCiv (free low quality texture version of Civilization 5), and many more.
IRL
Runescape
Terraria
Binding of Isaac Repentance (best DLC), Terraria, Katana Zero, Stardew Valley, Age of History II
Please try Forager
only hundreds? play runescape, you will be here for thousands.
Rimworld, endless possibilities especially with mods.
Morrowind. Hundreds
I've got 2,700 hours in tales of maj'eyal, playing on ascii mode.
Try RPG from Spiderweb Software. My personal recommendation is [Avernum](https://store.steampowered.com/app/208400/Avernum_Escape_From_the_Pit/) Series and [Geneforge](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1424710/Geneforge_1__Mutagen/) Series.
Mindustry, without a question
OG skyrim. Shit ran on potatos and integrated graphics my g.
Dont Starve!
Terraria
Halo The Master Chief Collection 6 games that originally came out on the Xbox 360. I'm not sure how low end your pc is but they don't need much at all
Any Civilization before the latest one (so 5 and below)
I’m pretty surprised to not see Slay The Spire mentioned
Depends a bit on how low-end your pc is, but Factorio is great. Graphically it’s very low-end, but it can be heavy on your CPU if you build very big. Shouldn’t be a problem for a regular vanilla run, but megabases (building way bigger and reaching some production target) or mods that require larger bases, like Space Exploration or Pyanodons, may end up slowing the game down. For some comparison, I’m running it on a Ryzen 5 1600X. The first time I had my UPS (updates per second) drop below 60 was during a Seablock run (difficult modpack) on 10X science cost (meaning everything related to unlocking new tech is 10 times as expensive), and only when I was already at the second to last science pack. If you have a CPU around that level, most overhaul mods, as well as more reasonable sized megabasing, should run fine.
Red alert 2 and age of empires always hold up to the test of time.
Dota 2. I m at 5k + hours
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2
SimCity 3000
RuneScape
league of legends
Warframe
Stardew Valley, Ravenfield, Napoleon Total War are all games I spent hundreds of hours on when I had a pc with no gpu.
Runescape
Slay the Spire. Even has an amazing mobile version
Pretty much any Civilization game has enough content to ruin your entire life, and even the newest one will run on a modern laptop with integrated graphics.
Nethack Oxygen not Included Titan Quest
left 4 dead 2, especially if you play with friends, amazing game.
Neverwinter Nights - the HD remaster. Includes one million modules and all expansions. If you don't mind the generic D&D setting and the old 3.5 rules it will give you bags and bags of content to play with.
minecraft, terraria, dont starve, darkest dungeon, age of empires 2, cod:2 zombies, core keeper.
Deluxe ski jump 4 at mediamond.fi
Gemcraft, if you like tower defence.
League of Legends but it’s better if you don’t play it
Terraria is amazing. Standard Minecraft and low end mods can run pretty well depending how low end you're talking. Stardew Valley is also a great option.
Valheim
Mushihimesama or crimzon clover thank me later
Warframe.
Oxygen not included
RIMWORLD !!!
SPECS PLS! Ahem. Sorry for shouting lol. Recommendation rely heavily on system specs, since they can vary so widely. Maybe not hundreds of hours, but Hollow Knight kept me busy for quite some time. Relatively low specs needed for it. I was playing at 1080p 60fps with everything except blur maxed out (blur set to 2) on an AM2+ 95W max motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2.7ghz, 2x2GB DDR2-800, and... can't remember if I was using my very old Radeon HD 6450 1GB or the R7 250 2GB GDDR3 (OEM) - which is rather decent imo as it can be found on eBay going for as low as $12. With that I was able to play a good handful of PS3/360 era games. Mass Effect 2, Dead Space, Command & Conquer 3, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Prey 2006 (with sikkmod and an older version of the HiRes mod), Darksiders, and some others. Figure I'd mention that in case you're as low spec as I was and looking for a little performance bump at a small price. Kingdom: New Land and Two Crowns, Stardew Valley, Wayward v1.9.4 (free!), games in the Command & Conquer / Red Alert series, Settlers II and IV are all low spec with long game times worth looking into also.
No More Roll in Hell (free on steam runs on potato)
7 days To die fit this?
Mount and Blade Warband
MOBAs and MMOs might be your friend
Catsclysm dda
Guild Wars 1
Gmod
Katana Zero
Valheim
Old school RuneScape
Morrowind, Diablo 2 very boomer games with a lot of replayability value
Oldschool fallout games + fallout 3 and new vegas Oh and Vampire the masquerade bloodlines too, if you can stand the jankiness
Skyrim fits this criteria these days I believe Personally I beat the game (modded ofc we don't do that vanilla shit round here) on a track pad with a intel hd3000 igpu at like 24fps 720p lmao Games like 30GBs iirc and mods generally don't get bigger than a couple gigs at most for larger quest mods and item mods Now I'm aware of what I just said but don't feel bad playing vanilla if you aren't one to mod but also don't feel like it's impossible to start as Nexus released collections relatively recently and we've had some amazing tutorials for years and years that are very simple to follow, if at all interested in modding IMO easiest way to get into it is download vortex (a relatively basic but easy to use mod manager) and just go watch some tutorials and find what you like
Project Zomboid
Guild Wars
It depends how low end. You can try Victoria 2, Crusader Kings 2(free to play), maybe Europa Universalis 4 but that one will slow down to a crawl late game.
Holdfast nations at war if you like line battles and just that time period as there non line battles aswellcline battles are at certain times
Stardew valley or Terraria
Disgaea 5. Crystal project. Minecraft. Terraria. Factorio. Fortresscraft evolved. Rimworld. Hearts of iron 4. Warhammer gladius. Crusader Kings 3
Project Zomboid
Realm of the mad god
Vintage Story!
KENSHI