Gaming

I'll always have a soft spot for Minecraft and it's open world base building goodness.

If you want "Minecraft, but more grown up," I can't recommend Vintage Story enough. It's actually an offshoot of a survival modpack for Minecraft if I recall correctly. A more involved crafting system (i.e. knapping tool heads out of stone, casting and forging metal tools, etc) and a threatening winter make for a very fun survival game. Still in active development with a pretty good pace of new content regularly, and a lively mod scene.

I've been thinking about playing some more Minecraft. I've never really played that much but I never joined a larger server and was mostly playing by myself the last time I tried. Maybe I'll find some people to play with this time.

I went back to Minecraft a couple weeks ago and just beat the ender dragon. It's a great time even if you've done it a dozen times before. I do this about once a year, It's fun to try and play it differently. Usually I try to go with huge farms of all different kinds (crops, meat, xp, iron, etc.), this time I went with micro farms, just enough to keep me alive.

My "peak" time in minecraft was somewhere around 2011/12 when a small server with friends evolved into a somewhat bigger (~100 players daily) fun server that I mantained for a year. Fond memories. Nowadays everytime I try to get back into it, I feel like I have to learn everything again. So much has changed. Still love it, playing for a while with my wife has become a yearly occurence, although I don't get invested in it like I used to back then.

Don't sleep on indie games either - there's a lot, and it can be hard to find something you're looking for, but they're the main place where the medium is really being experimented with. I occasionally like to just check out random games on itch.io and see what stuff is out there. I've found some pretty fun stuff that way.

Minecraft, or at least the java edition, has largely escaped the massive commercialization push of the gaming industry.

One reason for this is because the playerbase is so large; any rash change can really upset the community, especially the Java players. Although Microsoft has been trying to monetize Bedrock, they have decided to not touch the base game and has given Mojang a free reign.

I wasn't but you make it really tempting. I also love how I've been on many a different server, and each one has been completely unique in design. It really mastered the balance between a survival exploration game and creative sandbox.

Funny that you mention it, I got around to play around Minecraft after a long while. Essentials has made the experience of multiplayer a bit easier

I'm in two servers with friends where the rule is "we're all old, we just want to chill and build cool stuff, let's play together but at the same time pretend nobody else is actually on this server and just quietly build".

It's honestly so great. Solid plan, OP, you can't go wrong with a classic.