The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc

There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.

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vablings 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept

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robotnikman 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept

This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.

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rcxdude 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of bones files in nethack.

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omoikane 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.

I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.

	▲	rcxdude 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nethack does procedural generation pretty well, and indeed roguelikes are a pretty good framework for it, because the game design tends to revolve around giving the player different options to solve a given problem and they're also not too afraid to have the difficulty vary a lot between runs.

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gambiting 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know why but it made me think of the original premise of Drivatars in Forza games - Microsoft selling it as an "AI" learning how you drive, then your individual driveatar would be submitted to Xbox Live and would randomly appear for other players in their offline games, but it would drive just like you drive. Really cool concept, of that "footprint" of your play appearing in other people's games.

Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.

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opium_tea 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them

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robotnikman 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I actually created a Minecraft server plugin a long time ago which did this. It allowed server owners to create their own dungeons/buildings/etc and they would generate randomly in the world. It even supported custom procedural generated dungeons and structures.

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noir_lord 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mine was a procedurally generated FPS I've forgotten the name of, it used a seed key to generate the map and then you could fight on it, if it was a cool map you could just keep or share the key so was replayable.

Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.

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ratelimitsteve 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I play Tekxit for the same reason. The world feels genuinely alive and surprising. I just love automation as well, and Tekxit hits that sweet spot of "building complex resources extraction and refinement chains" but also "a big world full of adventure where you can actually use those resources for something other than making bigger machines to implement bigger processes to build more complex extraction and refinement chains".