I think Seed is the dawn of a new age for MMOs — after spending one month building a metropolis with strangers, this imperfect… — TechRadar

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

If you’d have told me that in the fine year of 2026, I’d be back to my hobgoblin ways of racing home to pour hours into a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, I’d probably have laughed you off.

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However, here I am, watching the clock until 5:30 PM so I can race home and log into Seed , a new life simulator from Klang Games that I think could herald a new renaissance for MMOs.

Summer Game Fest 2026 gave my colleague Dashiell Wood the chance to go hands-on with Seed , and his strong first impression held true when I got my hands on an early access code a little under a month ago.

Co-founded by veterans from CCP Games, the creators of Eve Online, the team behind Seed certainly has the credentials If you love games like Eco , The Sims and Factorio , you’ll be just as hooked as I am.

The game has already attracted a healthy audience, with thousands of active daily players. It’s a promising start, though it has to be said that a lot of work will be necessary to retain that audience and continue to grow in the months to come.

Still, I spend every waking moment craving Seed . In the last month, I became mayor, witnessed the rapture, and built a metropolis with total strangers — and I can’t wait to see what the game throws at me next.

A world of our own

Our society, Forest Dwellers, is coming along nicely (Image credit: Klang Games)

In short, your goal in Seed is simple: work with other real players in your randomly generated society and colonize the planet of Avesta, building a thriving community with a local economy and, later, global trade.

Because servers run 24/7, your playable Seedlings continue working and caring for themselves while you're offline—provided you set them up with balanced automations and basic necessities. There’s even a beta mobile app where you can check in and issue commands via chat; more on that later.

It’s surprisingly challenging, especially if you’re part of a foundling community. Your Seedlings aren’t always easy to keep alive when resources are scarce, meaning access to clean water and cooked food is an urgent undertaking. Seedlings can suffer from various health ailments and even die as they go about their lives; I lost count of how many times mine developed jaundice from compulsively drinking murky water.

It took me a solid week to nail down my Seedling's schedule — balancing needs against production lines, storage, trade, and resource shortages. At times, it’s a rollercoaster ride: the highs of logging on to see tens of thousands in revenue, and the low sof discovering that one misclick in an "if/then" automation halted all production.

All societies live on one sprawling world map, and as you progress, you’ll be vying with other player groups for territory and resources, and for attracting new players (with their wallets) to your town.

For now, at least, that feels like a distant problem; many societies are still developing. That’s part of what makes Seed so exciting as an MMO; it really does feel like the game is going to keep evolving with its player base, and already the choices from other societies have had a direct impact on how we run our own…

Life as an elected official

Klang Games

For the past month, my society inexplicably elected me mayor — an honor that gave me a front-row seat to Seed’s complexity. Societies evolve in stages based on shared goals, and with each step you gain new roles in government, features like legislation and slots for more Seedlings to join.

My own community has just become a Metropolis, with several of our more active players quickly training up their Seedlings into careers like carpentry, metalwork, tailoring and medicine. We've launched businesses from foundries and chemical plants to hotels and cafes to handle to service the 40+ Seedlings in our group and participate in global trade. It’s tough, but it’s honest work.

I’m also the proud magnate behind a furniture-making business, with my Seedlings specializing in carpentry and tailoring, and I’ve hired several players on the server into the fold to help me haul deliveries and craft furniture both to sell and furnish my two hotel businesses. You’re incentivised to pay your Seedlings well; your society's average salary and the balance of wealth is a key metric by which to attract new players, as are any society-level benefits you offer new players like bonuses, tax legislation, new business grants and even workers’ rights.

Finding the balance between this and also keeping the game fun for all involved is vital — and challenging. As I write this, a disagreement between two of the larger business owners in my society has led to a small fallout and calls for legislation around land ownership. Trust is essential, but hard-won among strangers.

Surviving the rapture

(Image credit: Klang Games)

There have already been quite a few exciting dramas in our society.

We founded on the first day of early access, so many players came through our doors to test the waters in Seed , only to then log out and never return. There are no NPCs in Seed , meaning all members of your society are real people — their activities need to be automated within the Schedule menu, or else your Seedlings will just kind of bimble around aimlessly.

We quickly discovered that even with well-populated schedules, those AFK players wreaked havoc in what I've dubbed 'The Great Haulening'. With many of them set to harvest and haul goods, our society was quickly overloaded with piles of resources and overwhelmed storage that disrupted our ability to trade globally by filling up our mailbox with junk.

Our solution to The Great Haulening was to place ample storage with specific resource configurations to keep things ti...

I think Seed is the dawn of a new age for MMOs — after spending one month building a metropolis with strangers, this imperfect… — TechRadar | AIPROPX