I think what makes the game great is that it contains a number of game mechanics, which are all interlocked and play nice together. That gives it enormous versatility. You can be a nomad explorer, or a builder who stays at base and never sees a hostile mob. You can be a redstone engineer, or a farmer accumulating insane amounts of resources. You can create map art and barter with other map artists on the server. You can hunt bases and either grief them or contact their owners and get to know their history. You can play mini games on commercial servers or code your own mods and play PvA (player vs admin) on anarchy servers.

You can find the exact combo and dosage that fits your playstyle, then switch gears a couple months later and turn the game on its head. I don't know of many games with that kind of variety.

Thing is, at some point you get the endgame infinite-weapon perk by aggressively working against developer intent; the zombification exploit is an exploit (unless they fixed it? idk I haven't played since before the update with the warden), setting up a farm with the desired villagers is an absolute chore AND Mojang made it worse by limiting Mending to swamp villagers (again, idk if that is still true).

By having a repair XP cost increment, you basically make endgame-enchanted items impossible to repair at all, and they're so tedious to create in the first place that you can't just forget about having mending.

You can live without them, but then you're either speedrunning the game, playing creative mode with less perks, or never using powerful gear because of the "I'll just keep it for when I need it" phenomenon.
So, enchanted items are an afterthought to a niche of players, and an annoyance to the majority.

Don't get me wrong: my problem with the current(?) system is not with resource farms themselved, it's with the gear progression being based on tedium and anti-tedium exploits.
Just thinking about the fact that I'd have to spend way more time enchanting my stuff than using it, makes me not want to get back to it.

Doesn't even have the usual "we value your privacy" lie.

There are videos on youtube that sum up main progression from stone to steel.

There are also other topics to learn, like prospecting for ore, leather making (for backpacks), animals handling, bee keeping (if you want lanterns), windmill building (to automate iron processing and as prerequisite for steel), and many more.

Survival hanbook (H key by default) have a lot of info and guides on game mechanics. Otherwise, google videos on certain topics.

It is fun to pass all these milestones and see how your small village grows.

P.S. As for storage, keep food and unprocessed animal hides in storage containers made from clay in cool cellar, bulk resurces (stone, ore nuggets, wood blocks) in crates and everything else in double chests that you can make as soon as you get access to copper (for nails and strips).

Some things like firewood, peat, bricks can be stockpiled right on the floor. Also you can lean tools to the wall or put them on tool racks for convenience. This also adds to an atmosphere of medieval building.

If you know Terrafirmacraft it’s roughly that. Basically to even get to a point where you’re chopping down trees, there’s a few hours of gameplay trying to replicate fairly realistic early human technological progression. But it has a shockingly good late game with quests and dungeons and bosses. Due to the slower nature of the tech progression, and you being a relatively fragile creature in a shockingly cruel world, the game feels like it’s always going somewhere. There is always something you can be doing to prep in some way.

It uses a lot of diagetic UIs and in world crafting which I love. Modding it is as easy as clicking the install button on the mod webpage and it launches the game and prompts the install. I do suggest using some mods, even on a first play through, because a lot of them are just things that make sense, and often get worked into the full game over time.

A couple more game changing mods I’d suggest are rivers, wind, sailboats, and canoes. Basically anything that makes water a slightly more viable form of transport once you’ve got a bit of tech. The game has more or less accurate geology, so materials will only spawn in specific rock types, and those rock types only occur in specific areas due to tectonic plate interactions. This means you’ll often go on loooonnngg expeditions to find a particular material, and I find water transport to be a very balanced tool with rivers because you cannot sail or paddle up stream, but downstream is very fast. You can use this to your advantage in some ways, while still forcing you to portage your gear at other times.

Anyway, I love this game. Check out the comm for it! [email protected]

the zombification exploit is an exploit (unless they fixed it? idk I haven’t played since before the update with the warden), setting up a farm with the desired villagers is an absolute chore

Not sure what you mean ? Villager curing is a legit mechanic, and it's not absolutely required. Personally i never bother, as emeralds are so easy to farm they're basically infinite. I see what you mean about building villager "trading halls", though, i used to hate it too. But it's not really required either i guess. You can just pop into a village, convert 3 or 4 villagers to librarians with the trades you want : mending, unbreaking, efficiency & protection will get you most of the way even if it's not maxed-out gear you'll already see the difference. For more marginal enchants you can explore the End and combine equipment you looted from there.

It's what i like in that mechanic, there's various paths to acquire good equipment, a minimal setup will take minimal effort but if you geek out you can make yourself a god-tier kit that will stay with you forever.

Anecdotally I used to roll with a crew that had a bunch of PvPers who'd lose equipment all the time, so we had this huge kit-farming district in our base that was really fun to design and build. The system is pretty in-depth and i wouldn't call it badly designed (even though it might not be to everybody's taste).

For those who are still interested but not in the know how, look into Vintage Story and Luanti

Even my local supermarket has like ‘258 vendors and affiliates’ as their cookie listing.

Can you imagine shopping in person there, and the entire supermarket packed to the gills with dudes in trenchcoats and magnifying glasses, taking a peak at the exact product that I might consider buying? That’s what they’re doing. Fuck all that bullshit.

Everything RIOT touches turns to shit, huh? Not surprised.

Vintage Story is fantastic! It even has a native Linux client.

Idk about any of these other ones (or even the full game) but Cubic Odyssey is like a mix of Minecraft, Starbound and No Man's Sky

I think this is the point of hard disagreement, I either make do with what villagers offer (by ignoring them entirely) or start exploiting, and neither feels satisfactory; I wouldn't call it in-depth either, data miners and META pioneers dug all the depth out of the system.

As for villager curing: the act of curing a villager is an intended mechanic, but what is not an intended mechanic is locking up a villager with a zombie, let the zombie eat the villager, cure the latter for a price reduction, rinse and repeat. Not required (like anything in the game, which is the point of it), but cuts some of the grind.

The same issue with all the Stardew Valley killers, even if they try not to.

It's a super toxic category constantly being compared.

Is this a game where I could reasonably discover how to progress by myself, as an average adult human with no special knowledge of history or technological progression? Or will I need to resort to a wiki? I'm cool with either but curious

The Luanti community generally does not see it as a "Minecraft killer" and doesn't want it to be that. But it's a cool project for sure.

"Minecraft Killer". For that, it should have been released first, shouldn't it?

And even if it was a super mega game, it might just find a niche on its own.

There is a very well done in game journal, that is essentially the wiki. It includes crafting recipes, as well as more free form, expository writing on general gameplay and progression. Most mods also do a good job of including their own journal pages and info as well. Though there’s some things that take struggling on before the info provided fully clicks. There is a prospecting system for example to help you locate ores since they are rarer with bigger deposits. I struggled with it for a while, but eventually you develop this sort of intrinsic sense of how to use the info the tools provide. There’s a very satisfying progression in most of the game systems from floundering at first, then understanding the numbers behind it, then internalizing the optimization and it becoming instinct. Very much matching the layperson to apprentice to specialist progression. I’ll finally add that the game does have sort of RPG style classes that encourage people to play multiplayers and specialize into a particular job. There’s is a commoner class that doesn’t have any drawbacks, but also doesn’t have the bonuses the other classes get which is okay for single player, but to give a small spoiler,

::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
I’d suggest using the tailor class for your first solo play through. Winters are brutal and being able to repair clothes rather than always have to craft new ones is huge. Also flax, plant lots of flax as soon as possible.
:::

Don’t be afraid to abandon a save after a few in game days and take what you learned into a new one. Or check out the difficulty settings/sliders, there’s lots of ways to tune your experience. If you don’t get your feet under you it can be grueling to try to recover.