This is a bit of a “Voyager probe has left the solar system” headline. Pops up every few years to remind us that words are ambiguous.

Not OP, but I’ve tried getting into Stardew multiple times and the fatigue mechanic absolutely ruins the game for me. “14 times” is an exaggeration but what it feels like.

People describe it as a cozy game but it is genuinely one of the most stressful games that I’ve played. As in I start clearing the land and then after a very short time my character is exhausted. Either I sleep it off and I’m worried I’ll plant late enough the crops will die in winter or I work through it and end up in the hospital with a bill. Sometimes I’ve used the time to explore the town (as it seems the game mechanics are telling you to do), whereupon I find the shops are closed and I collapse on the way back home.

The one or two times I’ve played long enough to harvest crops I end up eating all of it just to get to the end of the day. Most of the money I make is from selling actual literal garbage I’ve found lying around.

The result of that mechanic is that the game is basically telling me the most cozy part of the game (farming) I’m not allowed to play until I’ve invested enough time to stock up on energy drinks. I’m left with fishing, which just isn’t my thing, and mining, which is what I’ll mostly do until I get bored because it’s honestly kinda mediocre on it’s own. I just can’t get into this game.

(I’m aware that the main pull for the game is the characters, which if you enjoy that that’s good. I’ve just never had much of a reason to be invested in them)

If you like Rimworld the obvious suggestion from me is Dwarf Fortress. It’s on steam but if you’re not sure I believe there’s a free version with the original ascii graphics on the bay12 games website (at least there was when I last played).

Also Factorio might interest you, but for a laid back experience you’d want to turn down biters (mostly disabling expansions). May be mentally taxing.

Another comment mentions modded minecraft, which gets a +1 from me. Though if you want a “forever world” I’d suggest playing unmodded (save for some client side graphics / QoL if desired), as there’s at least some guarantee you can keep the world as the game gets updated. If you do go modded though I’d suggest using prismlauncher and browsing through premade modpacks on modrinth and curseforge. P.S. if you don’t already own the game somehow you’ll want java edition, not bedrock

I’ve been reading some of these other replies and my input is that to me you sound depressed / burnt out. I do not say that as a psychologist or therapist, if you want that diagnosis you’d have to talk to a certified one; however, the times in my life I have been more depressed the more I agree with this sentiment and the less I’ve been depressed the less I agree.

I’d also like to remind you that you are asking this on Lemmy, which means a lot of responses you’ll get here are from a certain nerdy, shut-in type. I say this because people here are likely to agree already, which is good for sympathies but not for answering your actual question.

When people say they enjoy being social, they are not lying (with caveats). Most healthy people have at least a couple of relationships they deeply value, and if you’re missing that I think it’s worth continuing to meet people even if it’s a lot of effort.

Work-wise though, yeah people are mostly lying there. There’s a much stronger insentive structure to lie.

I want to reiterate you should look into whether you’ve got burnout or depression, especially given the current climate. Those both have a way of draining enjoyment from seemingly unrelated things, relationships usually being one of the first.

OP can operate a freezer though?

Trying that with my steam deck right now, the amount I have to shift my hands down for the trackpads to feel natural is so low that I can’t even reach the X/B buttons, and my hands aren’t even that small. Kinda sucks I’ve never found a use for the bottom 2/3 of them.

I’ve gotten use out of it in minecraft as a numpad. Add 9 buttons, mapped to 1-9, and you can get to any item in your hotbar without shoulder button spam. It’s basically the only way I use it but most of my steam deck hours are in minecraft so it balances out.

For what it’s worth, Doom 2016 does a really good job of appealing to the goopy goblin gamer brain that hates story in away that other Doom games (perhaps with the exception of 1&2) just don’t. There’s only one sizeable chunk of low-gameplay story and there’s a clear acknowledgement that you clearly are going to run out the door as soon as it unlocks because you don’t give a shit. Doom Eternal completely dropped that pretense for some reason so I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much (I don’t dispise cutscenes like you do but I don’t play Doom for them).

I don’t mean to say the data is invalid, but you’re using the data to imply this experience and others like it are invalid. Maybe you don’t mean to do that but that’s what it sounds like.

Your point about zip codes though doesn’t really make sense to me for a few reasons.

Firstly, from the data that i can find, in my state the unemployment rates are only a little worse than the national average, in the “not great, but not hell” range you describe (report).

Secondly, a little over half of the positions I’m applying for are remote ones across the country, so they’d have to be discriminating on my zip for some reason, including the ones whom I never told where I live. The one employer that briefly got back to me was a local one just a county over for what that’s worth.

Thirdly, I only share a zip code with one of my friends, and he’s in the ‘has a job and lives with his parents’ camp; his job is also utterly unrelated to what he studied in university (though to be fair it’s in a field with historically poor employment).

From what I’ve seen, some people are getting jobs after getting layed off. The problem is that now I, with <1 year of experience, am now competing with others who have 3-5 for the same position. No company in this economy is going to choose me outside of a gamble.

I see the unemployment stats and they just don’t align with any of my lived experience nor that of anyone I know personally.

If I go on LinkedIn, every job listing says “over 100 people clicked apply”. I’ve done ~60 applications through various places and heard back from only 1, which proceeded to ghost me. Any of my frends that have found one did ~500, and not even at a livable wage so they’re still living with their parents. Every employer says their inbox gets so filled with applicants that they admit they have to resort to some poor heuristic (like applying in the first hour or having a ton of connections on LinkedIn). I’ve heard employers of service jobs are getting tons of overqualified candidates as runoff. I’ve shown my resume to people I know with multiple decades of experience in the field I want to work in and they tell my my resume is good. Of those that employ, they don’t have a position for me to fill but tell me if they did they’d hire me.

Is there a way on bls.gov to search unemployment by field, education, years of experience, etc.? I suspect it’d be K-shaped, with newlygrads getting the shit end of the stick.

I mean… parmesan ice cream?

Unusable in what way? I’ve been rocking a B580 for a whole year now and the drivers have been more reliable for me than the GTX 1070 I used before it, for what thats worth.