The best simulation games like Enshrouded are Valheim, Palworld and Nightingale. Below are 10, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to simulation costs you.
Filtering to simulation means you want a system to run or a routine to inhabit. It is the right filter when what you liked was being somewhere rather than beating something.
What you get: A game that does not need you to be good at it, and that rewards paying attention over reacting quickly.
What made Enshrouded worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the simulation part of that answer, and only the simulation part.
The benchmark for this wave — better progression, harsher survival, the same co-op shape.
Survival building where creatures do the labour, and a much lighter tone.
Survival crafting with a Victorian-fae setting and realm cards instead of one map.
Survival building as a vampire, with combat that is genuinely an action game.
The older survival builder with the best pure construction tools of the lot.
Smaller, funnier, and the best co-op pacing in the genre.
The 2D ancestor of carve-the-world-and-build-in-it, and still enormous.
Survival crafting with a story and a place that is genuinely frightening.
If the survival rather than the building was the appeal. No crafting fantasy at all.
Survival building where the point is what comes to knock it down.
Urgency. Simulations are deliberately slow, and the ones with no fail state give you nothing to push against.
The full list is on games like Enshrouded — 10 picks, no genre filter.
Valheim. The benchmark for this wave — better progression, harsher survival, the same co-op shape.
No. Enshrouded released on the PC & Modern Multi-Platform, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A simulation with no fail state and no time pressure. The label describes how it feels to play rather than what genre it is in.
No — one is about running a system well, the other about inhabiting a routine. Recommending across that line is where most simulation recommendations go wrong.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Enshrouded list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is simulation — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the simulation guide for where to start in the genre generally.