HOW CAN I END A SURVIVAL GAME AND LEAVE THE PLAYER SATISFYED?

Look at Nightowl's thread about the best ways to make hunger/thirst/etc. systems before jumping into this. It'll give you some insight into what players like to see in games like this.

I recommend you have a good hard think about what you want this game to be before you jump into making it. Do you want a survival game or do you want an RPG with survival elements? If you want the latter, the game would end when the story ends (obviously). See things like Fallout; those don't really end after you finish the story, but you can happily say you've "completed" it once you do finish that bit and it's a satisfying goal to have achieved.

Now take a look at things like Minecraft. That never really ends, because the need to survive never really goes away unless the character dies. Sure, you can build some magical automatic cow cooking machine or whatever, but that doesn't mean you've stopped needing to survive - it just means that all of the gameplay has gone away and your survival system is nothing more than an irritating hindrance on other more exciting things that the player has moved onto wanting to do.

I think that's where the survival elements stop and your natural endpoint should happen. You have to be sure that your character makes it absolutely clear that this is what they're striving to achieve throughout the game, and what needs to be done in order to complete it (build a certain building, reach a specific amount of resources, etc.) or you'll confuse/mislead your player.

I said this in Nightowl's thread, but it's an important note that should never be forgotten so I'll say it again:

author=Caz
Remember this is a game, and should ultimately provide either fun or some kind of experience that can be enjoyed overall.

Survival, when done well, can be a fun game element. But survival in real life is something that is very difficult and hard to work towards. Your game must simulate the reward that real life would, and your game should never be seen as a chore or you will quickly lose your playerbase. Not everyone will give a game a chance to be fun up to the point you do, and people will quickly close your game if the tiniest thing is boring them. To turn something so work-oriented into a game is a difficult task and I recommend you take every opinion you can get on this subject.

X-Com apocalypse isn't a survival game, but it feels like one for the first half. You're in a small city where all the surviving humans left alive live. Aliens are invading. You have limited land, limited people to recruit who die permanently, limited money, the city's weapons manufacturer can only make a few good weapons per week, and you have to maintain your reputation with the city's corporations which gets damaged if you or the aliens damage their buildings. Your only hope of getting enough resources to survive is to scavenge items from enemies you kill. Aliens show up endlessly, out of portals, in neverending numbers and ever-increasing strength.

Halfway through, something amazing happens. Your gathered items which you scavenged from enemies and researched suddenly come together and make a warp drive. And you're not stuck any more. You're able to go on the offensive, into the alien dimension, and it's the enemy who's playing a survival game. And all the stuff you learned in the survival game is important in a whole new way. You died so many times from running out of everything that you're intimately familiar with the process, and now you're in control of it and get to cause it.

I think if you did the same thing 90% of the way through instead of 50%, you'd get a very survival oriented game. Spend the entire game surviving, conserving, scavenging, exploring maybe, and then the stuff you find and earn eventually comes together to make an unexpected solution that let's you flip the tables and suddenly the monsters are the ones who have to survive. And they don't.

Another possible ending, which has become a popular way of ending these kinds of stories, would be for your team to get split up, and some of them get rescued, while one of the remaining members becomes the leader of the indigenous enemy tribe, and the others find an underground wheel that sends the entire area back in time forty years, and then the first group decides they have to go back, and they do so by timing a plane flight with a pendulum that's been synchronized with the quantum field of the place they came from, and then the ones who went back in time set off a nuclear bomb and create an alternate universe that also somehow warps them back to the present, and then they all discover that the source of all life on earth has been passed onto them, and then one of them stays to guard it while the others finally all escape, and then the alternate universe turns out to have actually been the afterlife. I've seen that one used once or twice.

Remember, not every game has to end. Simulation games often simply go on forever. No one ever beats Farmville or Simcity.

Without some form of accomplishments, though, there won't be much energizing the player to keep going. Though you could also make the game a tragedy, where in the end you simply survive long enough to die from some other cause...

-Weapons
-Ammo
-Villagers
-Fertile land
-Maps
-Electricity
-Fishing bait
-Makerscore

author=LockeZ
-Makerscore

The only resource that matters. Ever.