Survival game

Players generally start with minimal equipment and are required to survive as long as possible by finding the resources necessary to manage hunger, thirst, disease and/or mental state.

In some games, the world is generated randomly so that the player must actively search for food and weapons, often provided with visual and auditory cues of the types of resources that may be found nearby.

[2] The player character typically has a health bar and will take damage from falling, starving, drowning, contact with fire or harmful substances, and attacks by monsters that inhabit the world.

[3] For example, the survival game, Don't Starve, features a separate hunger gauge and a sanity meter, which will cause the death of the character if allowed to deplete.

The same concept applies to weapons and armor, with better offensive and defense bonuses provided by items made from materials which are more difficult to acquire.

As such, there is rarely any significant story in these games beyond establishing the reason why the player character has found themselves in the survival situation.

Minecraft, for example, allows players to place blocks to construct crude shelters for protection, but as they gather more resources and readily survive, players can create massive structures from the game's building blocks, often modeling real-world and fictional buildings.

An early example of the survival game genre is UnReal World, which was created by Sami Maaranen in 1992 and is still in active development.

The rogue-like game used ASCII graphics and placed the player in the harsh conditions of Finland during the Iron Age.

[10] From its initial public release in 2009, Minecraft focuses on resource-gathering and crafting in a procedurally-generated world, and requires the player to defend themselves during night cycles while gathering resources at other times.

[10] As a result of the financial success of Minecraft and DayZ, numerous titles of the survival genre were released from 2012 onward.