seaweedsheep
It has a barter system, but you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. Nearly everything you need in the game can be harvested or made.
Their other game, Grow: Song of the Evertree, is pretty fun too. It’s partly a city builder, partly exploring new worlds that you create. It’s been a while since I played it, so I remember some sort of currency, but I don’t really remember having to work that hard for it. Mostly, I just focused on creating worlds with crazy elements.
The Venture Bros. had an entire episode about this and it was excellent.
No idea what your reading level is, but here are some of the suggestions I’ve made to customers recently:
Harry Potter, if for no other reason than the cultural impact
Ender’s Game: children being taught to be elite military officers
Small Gods: satirizes religion, religious institutions, etc. If you ever want to read Discworld, this is a very good starting point
We Free Men: also Discworld, but YA-focused and about a girl who becomes a witch
Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal: author imagines what Jesus and his BFF Biff were doing for those thirty years missing not recorded in the Bible.
Kindred: a woman starts to travel back in time to the pre-Civil War South. She can’t control it and she doesn’t know why. Probably Butler’s most accessible novel.
A Canticle for Leibowitz: humanity nuked itself back to the early medieval period and this one holy order watches it rebuild. It’s hard to describe this book in a satisfactory way without just summarizing it, but it’s one of my favorites and I’ve read it multiple times
The Giver: YA dystopian novel about a very structured society and the kid who is able to see through it. The sequels aren’t too bad either
The Hobbit: much easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but full of the same heroics plus dragons, dwarves and a clever hero