NASA’s Artemis program is the space agency’s plan for returning humanity to our closest cosmic neighbor, the moon. This time, though, the idea isn’t just brief contact and exploratory surveys, but a sustained lunar presence, and the agency recently announced a long-term roadmap for building a $20 billion permanent lunar base.
Artemis II just circled the moon and returned home safely, paving the way for future missions to our natural satellite and the introduction of permanent infrastructure alongside Artemis V in 2028.
They may not be directly correlated, but alongside humanity’s increased interest in reaching for the stars, we’ve also seen a spike in popularity in base-building games in space. There’s a spate of dedicated builders like Space Engineers and Oxygen Not Included, and base building has also been cropping up in larger RPGs like No Man’s Sky and Starfield.
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Virtual moonbases: from Starfield to indie sims
Unsurprisingly for a massive, open-space, Bethesda RPG, Starfield‘s focus is more on fun mechanics than exacting realism. While the base building doesn’t feel like an afterthought, it’s also not the primary focus of the game, which leads inevitably to some streamlining and simplification.
Starfield lets you build modular outposts and use them as hubs for your further adventures in space. There’s very little consideration given to environmental factors and more to practical concerns like how they can serve the game’s other systems. As such, they feel less like proper bases or homes and more like industrial outposts. You can extract resources, automate production, and build crafting and upgrade stations (and they’re a good place to stash all the mountains of gear/trash that every Bethesda game is virtually awash in). Livability is secondary to finding resources to mine.
There are some management elements, like power requirements and building cargo links if you want to connect multiple bases, but the focus is on approachability and usability. That said, they can be a lot of fun to design and optimize, and the building systems are easy to use and intuitive. If you’re looking for a light base-building sim that supports a larger game, Starfield is a great pick, but don’t expect a deep approximation of what building a lunar base may actually be like.
For that, a better choice is a game like Moonbase Alpha or, despite the name, Surviving Mars.
Moonbase Alpha is explicitly supported and published by NASA itself. You play the role of an astronaut assigned to a base on the south pole of the moon. Shortly after your arrival, you witness a meteorite impact that cripples the outpost’s life support.
Your goal is to repair and restore crucial systems by coordinating a team of up to six players, equipped with rovers, robots, and authentic equipment that an actual research team would have access to during a lunar expedition. While the scope of the game is pretty limited, Moonbase Alpha is probably the most realistic look at what settling the moon (and exploring the lunar surface) would actually feel like.
It features an accurate lunar moonscape, real EVA and oxygen mechanics, and lots of the actual NASA equipment, like solar arrays, power generation systems, and robotics. The construction is already done here, though, so it’s more of a “living in a moon base simulator” than a builder.
For a more complete base-building experience that still retains a reasonable amount of verisimilitude, Surviving Mars is the best choice. However, to reproduce the moon base experience, you’ll probably want the Green Planet DLC (which adds lots of terraforming systems) as well as some mods to give yourself the true lunar experience.
Surviving The Moon
Surviving Mars includes realistic systems like modular pressurized domes, life support management, limited power and water resources, and supply dependence on Earth, making it a strong proxy for a Moon base. Its focus on resource scarcity, crew specialization, and critical infrastructure mirrors the challenges of operating a real lunar outpost.
To get as close as possible to lunar conditions, you’ll want to choose a map with low temperature and water availability, and high solar exposure. There are also mods available that will let you remove atmosphere effects and flatten the terrain to get closer to the lunar aesthetic.
To truly simulate moon-like conditions, you can also impose some self-enforced limits, like only using domes as pressurized habitats and using solar panels as primary power. You’ll also want to minimize wind and build large battery storage, restrict crew to between ten and thirty people, and emphasize logistics and Earth dependency.
With those constraints in mind, progress is slow and deliberate: you’re constantly balancing power, oxygen, and water with almost no margin for error, knowing a single failure can cascade into total loss. Between the tiny crew and heavy dependence on Earth resupply, the experience becomes tense and methodical — closer to running a real-world lunar outpost than a city-builder, where survival hinges on redundancy, efficiency, and careful planning rather than expansion.
Some other good game options are Oxygen Not Included, which has some extremely detailed sim elements like gas pressure, heat transfer, and (surprise) oxygen management, and lets you build on asteroids, similar to the surface of the moon.
Space Engineers is another good choice, with its lack of atmosphere, low gravity, and the ability to build pressurized bases and design airlocks, power grids, and vehicles.
There are also some exciting candidates on the horizon, including Possible One: Lunar Industries, which is being touted as “the first realistic lunar colony management game”.
Artemis base camp vs. video game design
So, where do games align with the actual plan for Artemis base camp? NASA’s plan for Artemis infrastructure includes habitats on the surface, Lunar Terrain Vehicles (LTVs) for traversing the landscape and transporting gear, pressurized rovers and solar power, energy storage, and modular microgrid systems for energy generation/conservation.
A lot of games replicate those systems to one degree or another. The best ones focus on the importance of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), which will be extremely important in real-world lunar colonization, given how labor-, time-, and resource-intensive importing goods from Earth is.
It will be vital for Artemis expeditions to harvest local resources, such as water from polar ice, particularly after NASA announced it is scrapping the proposed Lunar Gateway (a small station meant to orbit the moon) to focus on building a moon base.
Games like Space Engineers and Surviving Mars also do a great job of simulating energy bottlenecks; one of the major challenges of powering a real moon base isn’t so much generating enough power as delivering it efficiently and reliably.
Modular expansion is also an element that games tend to get right; it allows the base to grow safely, efficiently, and sustainably in an extreme, resource-limited environment.
In the real world, it means breaches in one area can be contained and not lead to cascading, catastrophic failure. It also means modules can be specialized, allowing for efficient power distribution and redundancies.
Life imitating art
By the time Artemis astronauts begin assembling a real foothold at the Moon’s south pole, the blueprint will feel oddly familiar, at least to those sim addicts who have been dreaming of a functional moon colony for decades now.
The best space settlement games have already trained us to think in terms of power budgets, fragile supply chains, and how we’d survive in a hostile vacuum.
It’ll be fascinating to see how closely some of the most realistic games have predicted what an actual lunar base will end up looking like as Artemis gradually constructs humanity’s first real off-world home.
