Faster than Light may be up your alley. I've put countless hours into it and there's still hidden paths I have yet to encounter.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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No Man’s Sky
Rust
If you're interested in contemplating your life and questioning your own sanity because you can't fucking play a game, you should try Dead Cells. It's amazing trust me.
If you're looking for something in the same vein as Dwarf Fortress, there's Rimworld. It's the game I hit 1000 hrs played the fastest, thanks to the ridiculous amount of mods available on the workshop.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
4X game Shadow Empire has interesting proc-gen for its planets — they start out as randomised astronomical specs, including star type, orbital distance and inclination, mass, composition, those feed into how the landscape is generated, what life develops (if any), and from there it runs through a simulated history of colonization and collapse.
Detective ImSim Shadows of Doubt generates small cities filled with hundreds of citizens with relationships, histories, jobs, and routines.
Space life sim Sol Trader starts with a proc-gen history phase to set up the people and organisations in the world.
Space sim Elite: Dangerous, and its prequels, make extensive use of proc-gen to create their galaxy-size galaxies. It was quite something to see Elite II fit so much in an executable that's less than half the size of the front page of this website.
Pioneer is an open-source space sim deeply inspired by Elite 2/3. Its system generator looks very similar to what I remember of that article.
Space Engine isn't really a game, but deserves honourable mention for not just generating a galaxy-size galaxy, but a (nearly) universe-size universe.
Nethack, Elite, Captive, Elder Scrolls, Magic Carpet, Simcity 2000 (reticulating splines)... oh, and a little game called Minecraft.
Procedural generation is common. The way Dwarf Fortress does it where the rules and game elements change is nearly unique. Pretty much just that and Nethack, AFAIK, which is why Dwarf Fortress stuck with Nethack-style ASCII so long.
In terms of elder scrolls procedural generation, hasn't that only been the case for daggerfall?
The first two games, Arena and Daggerfall, were both procedurally generated on the fly.
Later games have been more of a "procedurally generate the game geography using perlin noise, freeze it, then paint the valleys, roads and cities onto it" approach. Not dynamic generation but not handcrafted from scratch.