Soulash 2 Live, die, return as your heir

You start as a common person with almost nothing, and the classless system turns whatever you do into who you become. Swing an axe and your axe skill grows. Fulfill smithing orders for towns or military companies and the forge becomes your trade. Scour forbidden tombs for arcane knowledge if necromancy calls, or pick pockets and live outside the law. There is no fixed story pushing you along: you decide your goals, and the game gives you a world to pursue them in. One run you are a spear-and-shield mage who keeps enemies at a distance; the next, a merchant counting coin between villages. The role is yours to invent.

Every material in the world carries a property, and crafting means choosing which ones go into your gear. Recipes use a few component slots plus slots for magical ingredients, so a breastplate of half steel and half copper trades some protection for resistance to poison and acid. This turns gear into quests of your own making: you clear a ruin, open the chest, find mammoth fur with a bonus perfect for your build, and suddenly a trip to the frozen north is on the calendar. Your best creations can become part of the world's lore, artifacts that outlast the character who made them.

Before your character takes a first step, a simulation of history, resource extraction and production is already underway, and it keeps going after you die. Civilizations of elves, dwarves, gnomes, green-skinned races, cat-like rasimi, mushmen and ursans rise, grow and fall in the background. Each culture is shaped by the dangers of its home biome and carries its own distinctive items, so learning who makes what becomes knowledge worth traveling for. Diverse biomes hide both treasures and threats, and you choose to trade with it all, build among it, or conquer it.

This is survival crafting where the world does not cut you slack. Hunger, thirst and hostile creatures are real threats from the first hour, and death is permanent. You cannot even cut a tree without an axe, which means earning coin first, perhaps skinning animals and selling meat and fur, or selling stone if you picked a pickaxe at the start. The game explains little, and that becomes the point: figuring out that a knife can be made from a bone, or that food buys time to learn the ropes, feels like actual discovery. Come prepared, move carefully, and the world opens up.

Settlement building grows out of everything else you do. Start a family, build a home, then workshops, then magical colleges if you like. Attract families from around the world to grow your population and workforce, manage resources, production and caravans, and watch a hamlet become an economy. If that is too peaceful, raise an army and conquer neighboring settlements instead. Or skip the empire entirely, buy land back home and farm. Whatever you amass, wealth, buildings, a bloodline, passes to the next generation, and a new run begins as your own descendant in the world you helped shape.