alt Hacker NewsThe best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc
There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
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That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them
I actually created a Minecraft server plugin a long time ago which did this. It allowed server owners to create their own dungeons/buildings/etc and they would generate randomly in the world. It even supported custom procedural generated dungeons and structures.
Mine was a procedurally generated FPS I've forgotten the name of, it used a seed key to generate the map and then you could fight on it, if it was a cool map you could just keep or share the key so was replayable.
Iirc it used a voxel engine so would have been late 90's.
I play Tekxit for the same reason. The world feels genuinely alive and surprising. I just love automation as well, and Tekxit hits that sweet spot of "building complex resources extraction and refinement chains" but also "a big world full of adventure where you can actually use those resources for something other than making bigger machines to implement bigger processes to build more complex extraction and refinement chains".
This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept