Space Station 13.
Too many amazing moments and memories to even count, always more to learn. I love how the open source nature of the game means there’s many different servers branching off from each other, running their own custom versions of the game. Smaller servers “downstream” pick and choose which features they want to keep when the upstream servers implement something new.
You might not be aware but there’s also a fairly content-rich successor project called SpaceStation 14! Its obviously nowhere near as featureful as 13 is, due to lack of development time but has a very active development community around it.
One of the major (imo) improvements is a move to per pixel “real time” movement instead of the tile movement of ss13, it helps make them game feel much more alive and interactive.
Definitely worth a look for fans of ss13, and its also open source and Linux compatible.
I entered SS13 with the ssethtide and I stuck around past the worst of it but I haven’t logged in since probably 2021. Is it a good time to come back and see what’s up? I enjoyed high population servers and a lot of people were leaving with the tide around and before when I did. What’s an average server pop these days?
The overcomplexity of the game is part of why I love it so much but it’s also what drove me off of it, because I couldn’t figure out how to run an offline server to practice roles and I wasn’t trying to do my first day of engineering or doctoring on a public lobby if I could help it. I had a lot of fun in Mining and Cargo and occasionally just faffing about as an assistant helping Botany grow weed or bringing monkeys to the chef - but I’d like to learn “a real job” one of these days (he says, knowing exactly how pissed off everyone gets if mining or cargo either die or are understaffed). And most folks didn’t usually seem inclined to adopt assistants, unfortunately. Remember folks, adopt wandering assistants
and then spay and neuter thembecause unattended assistants will cook their hands off trying to break into the armory.I mostly play on tgstation’s european server Terry, which often gets up to 100 players in the busy hours.
I know exactly the kind of anxiety you mention when it comes to having to learn a new role. That was partly why I also had the idea of installing a server locally to tinker with the mechanics in, which fortunately tgstation actually makes very easy. My problem then is that I only have like 10 minutes alone on the station before the power runs out, and I have to go set up the solar panels to continue my experiments. Turns out being solo crew on a space station isn’t all that easy.
Super Tux Kart (I play it on Android) is NOT one of them. The physics system is bad at some moments, the items aren’t fun to use and some of them ruin the game. The overall game feels amateurish (in a bad way), but one thing that I like is the Windows Car and the drifting. Those are awesome.
I still haven’t tried it, but I’ve heard how great Veloren apparently is. It’s an MMO voxel game that takes inspiration from Zelda: Breath of the Wild and is written in Rust.
Definetly openTTD. I love trains and its so cool to see your little trains drive around, load some cargo, etc.
I love me some OpenTTD.
Tux kart I think it’s underrated and fun
Unciv is pretty cool, it is Civ 5 but you can play on mobile as well. It was great to have the “One more turn” feel while stuck on a train.
QuakeWorld and old school Doom for FPS, Beyond All Reason for RTS, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup for roguelikes, Hedgewars for a Worms-like.
Xonotic (quake-esque FPS, IMO its like quake and halo had a FOSS child), Minetest (a voxel game engine, multiple games are available for it), and Mindustry (sandbox tower defense) are the only ones ive tried so far
KeeperFX - an opensource decompilation project and fan expansion of Dungeon Keeper.
Mindustry, Endless Sky, and Unciv.
I don’t know if it counts, but I think the source code of Freespace 2 was released eventually und a non-profit license. The community did some great things with it, especially the Blue Planet campaign.
God, I loved this game.
Pioneer, a remake of the original Elite, with Neutonian physics.
This looks cool! Gonna try it but I will probably be hella overwhelmed by the complexity :3
Velorem and Endless Sky!
VCMI - it’s re-written from scratch, open source, multiplatform Heroes 3 engine with many improvements and mods manager. It requires some files from the original game though.
Apotris is an excellent famous-block-stacking-game clone for the GBA (and other platforms), it has a version for Portmaster that will run on many if not all Linux handhelds like the RG35XX and similar, but will also run in any GBA emulator.
