Stormworks: Build and Rescue is an open-world adventure where you design, build and pilot your own air-sea rescue service. You create programmable vehicles using its block-building system and pilot them into dangerous situations to rescue stricken vessels or individuals. Planning is as important as execution if you are going to safely carry out your rescue.

The Custom Creative Mode gives you all the resources and time you want to create large and complex vehicles. Players enjoy making scale replicas of real-world vehicles or wacky and ambitious creations of their own design.

The Career Survival mode offers missions to progress through, that slowly unlock more features and resources to build with. You manage your finances, build space, and your own safety as you complete various missions to finance larger, more complex vehicles and new land bases.

The vehicle construction is done by placing blocks and specifying their behaviour using the powerful in-game logic system. Choose from a wide array of components to assemble your own rescue helicopters, boats, and submersibles. You can then take to the sea, land or sky in your newly created vehicle.

The game is played in a huge 15,000 square kilometres of ocean and islands in a dynamic world. The day-night cycle and dynamic weather system create diverse environments to put your creations to the test. Calm sunny mornings. Unforgiving stormy nights. These all affect your vehicles using physics-based hydrodynamics and displacement-buoyancy systems. Because of this, you need to design specific vehicles to respond to challenging missions across open oceans, island facilities and remote rigs.

Many players focus on the boat and helicopter building with its deep level of skill required and understanding of the game's logic. It's the sort of emergent gameplay that Minecraft has become famous for, here side-stepping the rescue mission in favour of pure build craft and engineering.