Black Skylands vs Salem
Black Skylands
Black Skylands is a sandbox-based adventure set in the skies. In this game, you’ll not only get to customize your very own airship and rebuild the Fathership (your home base); you’ll also get to embark on an exciting adventure to recover various floating islands in Aspya from the Falcons in the name of the Earners. To do so, you’ll need to clear all Falcons on those islands. And there are also creatures from another plane...For what it’s worth, Black Skylands is truly a very promising game, but the game has way too many bugs and issues to provide a suitably enjoyable experience. It is possible that your hours of effort will just go down the drain if you happen to encounter a bug that required a fresh gameplay to fix. It might be wise to wishlist the game for now and buy it later down the road, maybe after the game is launched.
Salem
Salem is an old-school and somewhat obscure (but fun) sandbox MMORPG that unlike Wurm Online has a stronger emphasis on its in-depth crafting system and survival aspect rather than building.Similar to Wurm Online though, Salem is not a voxel-based game, but you are still able to mold the game environment through resource gathering, mining and digging in a way that reminds me of the currently-shelved MMORPG, EverQuest Next: Landmark. Of course, although not exactly the focus of the game, you can still build your homestead and the process is quite similar to Wurm Online except that it occurs at a much higher speed.
Not to mention, the game world in Salem is simply humongous to the point where it feels like an actual world. Salem also borrowed some features from ArcheAge where open-world PvP is the norm, so you'll need to be vigilant at all times, but players who kill and steal for no reason will be labelled as criminals and can be punished.
However, as good as it is despite being an indie MMO and all, Salem does have its fair share of flaws due to its low development budget. So, we'd recommend you to take a look at Salem without carrying along any high expectations. It's a pretty good MMORPG like Minecraft, but if you're expecting a Minecraft clone, you may end up disappointing yourself.