I don’t think so, considering that it was written in 1999. And it’s just way too specific for something LLM would come up with.

It is fun, but buggy + doesn’t have great performance in some areas. I’ve recently played it for a bit on 1.1 patch drop, and lasted for about 6 hours until I hit a brick wall of a progression blocking bug. There was a decently large thread about it on the forum, no dev response, no fix in the next 3 hotfixes, so I stopped playing. Might come back for 1.3 or something.

Yeah, one of the only games I’ve 100%ed, the achievements are deliberately set up so that you can get most of them organically by the time you get to the true ending. The rarest achievement on Steam has like a 6% obtainment rate, which is a lot.

The real juice of modded minecraft is in the modpacks - curated sets of mods that were configured to work well with each other, frequently with some custom recipes added by the pack developer, and sometimes some kind of a quest line to guide you through the pack and provide a more structured experience. There are many different types of modpacks - kitchen sinks (large collections of mods, frequently without a lot of balance tweaks or changes, for a more sandbox experience), questing packs (with the aforementioned quest books to guide you through the mods), vanilla+ packs that intend to expand on the vanilla minecraft experience and not change the gameplay loop significantly, packs focused exclusively on magic or technology mods (or both), expert packs (questing packs with heavily reworked recipes, where you need to build elaborate machines and automate stuff Factorio-style)…

I’m not up to date with the modpack scene, so can’t really make you a definitive list - back on reddit (sigh) there is a r/feedthebeast community that specializes in modded play.

That said:

• FTB Academy seems to be a pack specifically meant to teach the basics of modded play.
• Project Ozone 3 comes up quite often as a pack with a good quest book that guides you through everything.
• Cottage Witch is what I’m currently starting, it’s (so far) a chill magic vanilla+ pack. New creatures, new plants, some new mechanics, tons of new decorations for building.
• Peace of Mind is an older pack made specifically for playing on Peaceful, if mobs are stressing you out. It’s got a good questbook too.
• and if you want to jump straight into the deep end… Enigmatica 2 (or 6) Expert, Gregtech New Horizons. Expert packs in which you need to automate everything to progress. Gregtech in particular is infamous for its complexity, difficulty, and length, but if you enjoy solving hard problems it might be for you.

You’ll also need a launcher to install these packs - FTB have their own if you want FTB Academy, otherwise there are some options such as Curseforge (do not recommend, eats resources just by existing), Prism (seems to come up a lot as a recommendation), or GDLauncher (what I’m using).

All of these are classic roguelikes, a genre of games which frequently aren’t much to look at. The tradeoff for the looks is that they offer vast depth and complexity… and (usually) permadeath and a learning curve that’s more of a cliff. I recommend watching some yt videos about any roguelike you want to learn more about, just so a fan can explain the appeal and show off all the basics.

That said:

Caves of Qud - actually one of the prettier classic roguelikes, if you can belive it. You’re a traveller in a strange and unique world of vast salt deserts, jungles, and the titular caves. There is a ton of flavorful, semi-randomly generated history (especially the ever-important tales of the sultans) and cultures, so every run feels different. There is technically a main plot, but you can just ignore it and go exploring - it’s a sandbox experience. The best parts, to me, are the aforementioned flavour, the tactical combat (that can get incredibly chaotic, with screen-warping effects going off every turn), the build diversity, and delving too greedily and too deeply into the caves.

Cogmind - haven’t played this one, but it’s on a list. You’re a robot. You’re building yourself from parts as you go, fighting other robots and stealing their parts.

CDDA - one of my faves, but definitely not something I’d recommend as an intro to this genre. You’re a survivor in a zombie apocalypse. Go do things and don’t get bitten. It’s a sandbox - survive as long as you can, achieve a self-set goal. The distinguishing feature of CDDA is how realistic it tries to be - crafting is very complex, you need to track your thirst, nutrition, and sleep, you can easily get sick or get your arm broken, the zombies can track you by sight, noise, and lingering scent… My favourite part is surviving long enough to build elaborate apocalypse death mobiles, Mad Max style.

I’ll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it’s rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.

In general I’d say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I’ve heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn’t know, I’m one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.

The 2 hour refund window is for automated refunds, you can still make a request if you’re past that - it’s just going to need a human to take a look at it. I’ve once succesfully returned a game I’ve played for about 5 hours because it had game-breaking bugs and ran like crap for no reason, and it got accepted within a day without an issue.

So Helldivers owners have a chance. I’m assuming that Steam’s Customer Support department is having some kind of an internal discussion right now on how to handle this case.

I have a T450, I’m dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu (…I know, I know, I’m just too lazy to swap) on it and it works great, I get better performance on Ubuntu than I do on Windows. The fans worked oob.

Trams are, as you’ve noticed, a different usecase - subways are for getting you from A to B quickly, and trams are for getting you to the subway stop/straight to your destination on a shorter trip. One prioritises speed and throughput, the other - access and ease of use. Both should be used together to form a good transportation network, with buses and trains going to more remote/less dense areas.

Maybe Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente? Her Orphan’s Tales have some interesting cities too, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

Again, not just one city, but take a look at Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - it was a direct inspiration for Fallen London.

China Miéville might be worth checking out - go for either the City and the City or for Perdido Street Station.