In the way a sandbox should, yes - better exploration, mechs, expedition stories, freighters, better base building, etc. It’s a sandbox game, it’s not feasible for a game to be as deep as a rpg and wide enough to do anything you want without adhering to a story or dev-induced goal. Dwarf fortress might come the closest to that, but that’s only because they have a super wide fortress mode and a super deep adventure mode and they are fully separate.

If you want a deep gameplay loop, play a game meant for it like a rpg. Those are meant to be deep but relatively narrow to keep you on the story. If you want a wide pool to do whatever you want, play a sandbox like NMS or Minecraft.

Yep! Unfortunately your parents forgot to put an actual brain in you, and it doesn’t seem like they’ll be getting around to it

I love indie games - here’s my favorites list!

Terraria
Deep rock galactic
Factorio
Dwarf Fortress
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free and open source - check it out!)
Stardew Valley
Starbound
Rimworld (I much prefer dwarf fortress, but I found this first and got a few hundred hours in it too)
Battlebit remastered

I got the game and some small ship bundle a year or two ago for like $20. It was a pretty fun game for the cost, but I honestly wouldn’t pay more than $30 for it. It’s buggy, runs like hot garbage even on my 3080 ti, and it’s very much a mile wide inch deep content wise from what I remember

I switched to proton mail about 3 months ago since I was already using proton VPN and pass and I’m very happy with it so far. If you use pass + mail you can easily create website-specific aliases (automatically or with a few button presses) so you don’t expose your own email, and if you start getting spam you’ll know exactly who sold your email.

Primary downside is that since all of your mail is encrypted, on mobile you can only use the official proton mail app, not any third party apps. On desktop there is a bridge app that lets you use others though (I personally use thunderbird)

Lutris is awesome.
Open source games, games with their own launcher, games on steam, gog, etc are all in it. Can pick to run things natively on Linux, use proton (pick your version or just use latest), wine, or choose from others, and it does it seamlessly. For games you already have installed on steam, you don’t need to reinstall them, it finds them and makes them runnable from within lutris once you connect your steam account, you can also install games that you own on any of your connected launchers, and browse/download your undownloaded games from them

Examples for some of the stuff I have all in it now:
Catacyslm: DDA catapult launcher (free and open source game - highly recommend you try it out. Takes some getting used to, but there isn’t much you can’t do. Also, make sure you get cataclysm-tiles or use a launcher. ASCII is pure, but hard to get used to. Also, DO NOT buy it on steam.)
All of my installed steam games
Cyberpunk 2077 and the witcher 3 via gog
FFXIV (the official launcher, not steam)
Vintage story (open source but not free - highly recommend if you like open world survival crafting games with a big emphasis on survival)

When you said poe2 I thought you meant path of exile 2 and thought that I had missed the release somehow

If you want a more realistic (mechanics mainly, better graphics too but still blocky) and survival focused game, vintage story is great. It’s meant to be very realistic (mechanics, not graphics) so it’s a very different play style than Minecraft.

Need storage? Make a reed basket with 8 slots and doesn’t help food preservation, or make a ceramic storage vessel with 12 slots that decreases rate of food spoilage. Manually build clay storage vessels voxel by voxel, put it in a pit kiln, cover in dry grass, sticks, and firewood and let it cook for an in-game day then you’re good to go.

Food? Better hunt, fish, and grow crops. Make soups, stews, jerky, etc - better make sure you have a cellar with sealed jars of food for the winter though. Also need to balance soil nutrients for crops to grow well.

Leather stuff? Have you to kill animals, skin them, get pelts, soak in limewater/borax and water solution in a barrel, scrape them with a knife, soak in weak tannin then strong tannin (made by soaking oak or acacia logs in barrels of water), then you finally have useable hides.

Charcoal? Have to get a bunch of logs, cut them into firewood (crafting recipe so this part is quick), make a 2x2x2 to 11x11x11 hole and fill fully with firewood, light a fire on top, cover, and wait a day. If it’s not fully covered you’re just left with a bunch of ash instead of charcoal.

Metal tools? Have to get the ore/nuggets, melt over a charcoal or hotter fire, pour into ingot mold, hammer and clip it into the desired shape, cool in water. Want to carry something hot by hand? Better have some tongs or you’ll take damage.

Trying to cook inside? Smoke can build up if you don’t have a chimney - and your fire can go out if it’s raining and the chimney is straight down.

Everything takes a lot more work than Minecraft because it’s meant to be more realistic - but there are so many mechanics that it’s a ton of fun to learn and complete stuff. My current playthrough I’m still sifting sand to get enough copper nuggets/items to make a pickaxe to mine some copper ore to make more tools, but I have a nice little stash of vegetable and meat meals stored in crocks in my hole-in-the-ground cellar/bedroom. Still need to get around to making an actual shelter and cellar, but I want a pickaxe first so I can make a nice sized cellar to preserve food through the winter.

Have you tried QOwnNotes? I haven’t used it but I’ve seen it, looks like it ticks everything you want.

I would also highly recommend logseq, org-roam, or vimwiki. For mobile support, definitely use syncthing (logseq has a paid sync feature, but it’s not worth it over self-hosting syncthing imo. It’s easier technically speaking, but syncthing is pretty easy too)

Logseq - I use this now, primarily because the mobile app is as great as the desktop version. Links, tasks, etc are all smooth and I love the workflow. Only reason I don’t think you’d like it is you can’t really have your own defined dir structure.

Org-roam - uses .org files that have their own syntax and such, also foss and non-proprietary though. I used it for a while because the emacs ecosystem is very robust and I use emacs a lot. Primary downside to this system is mobile support hurts, I used OrgNote for a while but just didn’t like it much. (If you go this route, highly recommend using doom emacs instead of just vanilla. Vim keybinds are the best keybinds)

Vimwiki - uses vim keybinds, love it. Same issue as org-roam though, mobile support makes me cry. There are plenty of foss mobile md editors, but none of them feel good. You can use this as a wiki via GitHub and have access to it from any web browser and make edits there as well, but it wasn’t a very pleasant workflow personally.

Yep it’s still chill. The war just started so I’ve spent the past 2 hours driving materials from my regiments stockpiles to the Frontline, eventually partisans (enemies behind the Frontline) took out my truck so I flagged the location, next time I drove through they were all gone and I kept delivering supplies. Even if you mess something up in logistics, no one is going to get mad at you. It’s competitive in that each team hates each other, but largely unless you start trolling or team killing people are positive.

If you do end up getting it I can help ya get started learning stuff if you need

The next war in foxhole starts today, it’s a war MMO and I highly recommend it. No subscription (one time $30 purchase on steam), no microtransactions, no paid expansions, no cosmetic bs, grind is optional. New players are in the same spot as veterans, all resources are shared (regiments/people can have private stockpiles, but they decay after 48 hours of being inactive) and are all made by players. You don’t get anything for making or transporting supplies except for the joy of supporting the war effort - which is good because if no one made supplies, no one could fight.

Want to chill? Mine scrap and make basic materials, throw in your nearest seaport for anyone to take (or put in your regiments stockpile if you’re in one). Or transport supplies from far backline stockpiles to Frontline/closer via truck, train, or boat. Or drive supplies to the Frontline, just make sure you have a gas mask and radio! Or make bullets, medical supplies, or anything else in the game at factories. Or trucks, cars, boats, tanks, trains, etc.

Want to plan? Either start building up production centers at the start of the war, rebuild them as we take land, or build defenses in the backline or on the front.

Want to fight? Get on a ship crew in an artillery gun and listen to your captain to tell you when and where to fire. Get in a tank with a crew and go balls to the wall on the front line. Grab a gun and some supplies and charge into trench warfare. Mortars? Yep. RPG’s? Yep. Want to be a doctor? Move with friendlies and fix them up when they get messed up, or carry them back to your hospital to get new supplies for people to spawn from.

Want to be sneaky? Sneak past the Frontline and sabotage their logistics people or buildings.

Want to be a gigachad? Join the wardens now.

I think it was partially to make the statement more sensational, because 60 sq km is ~23 sq miles, so it barely makes the top 30 biggest games by map size (as of some 2023 articles)

In cyberpunk 2077 they have posters, messages, and emails about a game called “no life 3” - including that it is finally almost going to be released in 2077 after a very long wait since no life 2

I mean, overwatch was good, until blizzard did what blizzard does

I definitely think so (plus I think it’s a great game now, even though it was hot garbage at launch). The continuing updates are 100% a labor of love at this point, I’m sure they still sell more copies each update, but not enough to justify the cost if they weren’t wanting to work on it. I love me a good labor of love game.

They’ve also been working on Light No Fire for ~6 years at this point so they’ve been doing more than just making new content for NMS this whole time

There’s plenty to do - it’s just sandbox based. There are some questlines you can do, but it’s largely meant to be an exploration sandbox game, not something that you’re constantly rushing from quest to quest with everything scripted out linearly or have a clear end game, the end game is to do whatever you want

Games were over hyped, released buggy, and lacking a ton of features long before no mans sky, nms was just one of the most over hyped - it’s also by far the biggest redemption since it now has significantly more content than was ever promised at launch, and all of it has come free instead of in a ton of dlc’s or with monetization

I can skip the search engine and go right to the bad suggestions, finally!

I use vim keybinds (via doom emacs) for this sort of stuff if I’m doing it for personal projects, my professional work is all done in an online platform (no way around it) so it’s just faster and easier to throw the pattern and columns at the integrated chatgpt terminal rather than hop to a local editor and back

I use chatgpt semi-often… For generating stuff in a repeating pattern. Any time I have used it to make code, I don’t save any time because I have to debug most of the generated code anyway. My main use case lately is making python dicts with empty keys (e.g. key1, key2… becomes “key1”: “”, “key2”: “”,…) or making a gold/prod level SQL view by passing in the backend names and frontend names (e.g. value_1, value_2… Value 1, Value 2,… Becomes value_1 as Value 1,…).

Didn’t even know it was out yet tbh

Steamboat Willy is in the Public domain as of Jan 1st

Hot take: I think ow2 is actually a pretty fun game to play in terms of gameplay still, they just made a lot of bad decisions for ow2. The loot boxes to battle pass is a horrible money grab change and I refuse to get the battle pass, the nixing of pve is stupid since that was the whole reason behind their lack of content for a few years, and dropping to 1 tank means 1 person now can determine the whole fate of the team basically. The only upside to ow2 is that queues are much faster now

Honestly I haven’t run into any major bugs yet, but I could just be lucky. Definitely agree that the crafting orders menu sucks though

The history is the real selling point for me, idk any other game that builds a rich world of history fully randomly like they do. Can’t wait for the adventure mode release on steam

Highly recommend trying dwarf fortress if you like rimworld!

Definitely a great game. Recently had a pretty big update adding enemies and combat that has been fun so far but you can also just disable combat mode for a chill time building your swarms/spheres

I initially was waiting for Star Field to be less than $70 after launch, instead I lucked out and no longer have any desire to get it for anything higher than free

What I’m learning is that I’m really glad that I told myself I wouldn’t be buying it until it was on sale post-launch to see if it was even worth the sale price

I feel a bit bad, but I abandoned rimworld basically as soon as I found dwarf fortress. I have about 200 hours in rimworld, got at least that in dwarf fortress before the steam release. Up to 50 hours on the steam version now, I would definitely have a lot more hours on both but work and some side projects have been keeping me busy

Same, I’m probably going to wait until the first sale since I don’t want to support $70 as the new game standard unless the game is actually worth it (not a big ridden mess and bugs get patched in a timely manner, content and gameplay lives up to the hype, etc). If it sounds like there aren’t many bugs and the content lives up to the hype I may buy it at $70, but I’m trying to avoid it without missing out

Same, the only streaming services I have now are paid for by my phone provider for free. Besides that, I sail the high seas proudly

It wasn’t, it’s dig-n-rig. That said, I really need to redownload Starbound, it’s been a while since I’ve played it but I remember it being a lot of fun too

Another commenter got it, the game I was remembering is dig-n-rig

This is exactly it, thank you so much! The digipen must’ve been why I was thinking digiminer.

I had a lot of issues with Jerboa being buggy and randomly crashing personally, but that could’ve just been my experience. I switched to Connect for Lemmy and haven’t had any issues (and it looks better imo)