The best simulation games like Grounded are Grounded 2, Subnautica and Valheim. Below are 9, 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 Grounded 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 follow-up, same premise, larger garden.
The other survival game with a real story and an ending.
The best co-op survival building game, and generous with progress.
The closest premise match — tiny character, huge world.
Small-scale co-op survival with a clear direction to progress in.
If you want survival with real horror pressure.
Survival crafting with creature collecting on top.
Survival building with proper action combat.
Gentle co-op survival with no combat pressure at all.
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 Grounded — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Grounded 2. The follow-up, same premise, larger garden.
No. Grounded released on the Xbox Series X|S, 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 Grounded 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.