I, too, will still be playing Factorio.

Also playing Factorio.

Ooh. I’ve heard of Frostpunk and Tropico but never played them myself. If they’re similar to Rimworld I need to check them out.

Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.

It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.

The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.

Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.

Oh, hey! Another Ratchet: Deadlocked fan in the wild!

No wait…

Where do I apply for my “I beat Radahn before he was nerfed” badge?

Wildermyth is an awesome indie RPG that I’ve had a lot of fun with as a two-player coop game. It’s a turn-based dungeon crawler with a strong focus on role play and party dynamics.

I hear great praise for Across the Obelisk as a coop game from my friends, although I personally bounced off of it. It’s a roguelite deck builder like Slay the Spire, but with multi-player, lots of meta progression, and a heftier time commitment for each run.

Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite looter shooter that’s a blast in coop. I think it’s still in Early Access, but what’s already there is enough for me to be happy with it as a full game. To me it’s a spiritual successor to Borderlands in combat and gamefeel, but without the grinding.

Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.

Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I’d only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I’ve been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that “I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then.”

Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven’t looked back.

I did end up picking up Satisfactory before they raised the price for 1.0.

Tried it out and it is fun but I do find it lacking.

The first person perspective is awkward and makes actually building the factories frustrating. The simplicity of the actual factory mechanics and limited resource availability (static nodes with no way to scale production) are a bit boring.

The emphasis seems to be less on making a productive or efficient factory and more on making an aesthetically pleasing factory while lacking any tools to make building the factory pleasant. No bots. Limited, feature incomplete blueprints. No way to unlock the camera and get a good perspective on what I’m building.

The snapping feature is unreliable and I have to constantly jump through hoops to get buildings and conveyors to line up correctly, only to go back over it and find some parts are clipping or it lied to me about where it was snapping.

It’s a very pretty game and I love that it exists, but it doesn’t emphasize the parts of factory games I enjoy. I want to work my way up the tech tree to macro-manage the factory construction. Satisfactory never gets out of the micro-management of construction. It’s way more personal, and that’s a beautiful concept that doesn’t work for me.

Still going to play it on 1.0 release. The factory must grow. I need my fix.

Thank you. That’s a flawless description.

This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.

Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it’s the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.

Hades, yes. That’s a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.

Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you’ve maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It’s still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there’s no more meta-progression.

The price.

Bought a used '96 Mazda Protégé off a coworker for $700. Ran it into the ground. Scrapped it for $300 when I could finally afford a better car. Definitely got my money’s worth.

I got to learn what driving without power steering felt like after the compressor locked up and the drive belt shredded. Ended up replacing it with a smaller belt just for the power steering since I couldn’t afford to replace the A/C. Drove with the windows down for a few months. Good times.

Yes. I check the organ donor box when I renew my driver’s license. If I’m in an accident then I don’t need 'em anymore. Let someone else use 'em.

But there’s no sense crying after every mistake.

You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake.

CHLOE YES!

My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.

Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn’t really get anywhere with that.

Eventually I had money and time to put together a “proper” gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I’d had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.

Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I’ve only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.

Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It’s got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.

I really like how the web serial Sideways in Hyperspace handles this problem.

In short, the faster ships catch up with the slower generation ships, facilitating trade, arranging transport for those who want to leave, and allowing them to become extrasolar cities and stepping stones to the wider galaxy.