Socializing well is one of the hardest struggles of being a human, and even people that are naturally social still may not get along well with others. I like to recommend the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Think of it like a “For Dummies” book on socializing. It has a lot of real-life anecdotes for difficult social situations people overcome and how. I should mention I just pirated the audiobook for it though.

Also, like others have said, I like listening to Healthy Gamer on youtube/twitch. He’s a real, active therapist with a lot of experience helping people with these kinds of things, particularly for gamers. You can also just play it in the background while doing other things.

This is good advice. Interactions between people usually have loose scripts, but are mostly improv, and a big part of that is encouraging the other person to keep talking about what they are interested in. The hard part for me is usually when I find I don’t have much to add, but usually I try to agree and paraphrase what they’ve said. This shows you’re genuinely paying attention and care about what they have to say, and invites them to clarify or keep going. Really, just try to find things in what others say that you can agree with in general and you’ll likely be in a pretty good spot.

You might look into Vagrus - The Riven Realms. It’s a game where you manage a trade caravan and deal with resource management and random events. Also, Elite Dangerous or something like Euro Truck Simulator could be good.

Good to know, thanks!

Cheers!

The only modpack we used was called “Direwolf20 1.19 1.7.0” on FTB. It bundled a lot of tech mods that we used together, so I would recommend the pack as a whole. The machines I used primarily came from Mekanism (which also had the jetpack and free runners) and Mekanism: Generators, but I also used some things from Thermal Expansion and pipes from Pipez, although I’m sure Mekanism’s native pipes would work fine too. I am not sure where the nuclear stuff came from.

Like others, I highly recommend modpacks. My friends and I were playing on a server with one of the more recent Direwolf packs and it really reignited my interest in the game. They add content that rewards you for progression and adds ways to earn quality of life improvements.

For example, you can make a series of machines that break down and refine raw ores to multiply the yield from raw ingots but require power. Power can be harnessed in the same ways as real life, but I used a method that used fuel made from organic food mixed with hydrogen, which was gathered from electrolysis. The oxygen I used for scuba tanks to explore the oceans, and excess hydrogen became fuel for a jetpack that made navigation much more fun. And there’s things like freeriders that prevent fall damage (at the cost of durability) and allow auto-stepping over one block elevations, which doesn’t sound like much but is so nice that I find I can no longer play Minecraft without it.

You could make mining lasers that use power to break down blocks quickly and can be upgraded to target more blocks at once, be more efficient, auto-collect blocks, have silk touch, etc. Upgradable portable storage and backpacks also let you keep anything that might be useful on hand, and could do other things like play music or auto-feed you from stored food. There were other simple quality of life things like graves that kept your inventory stored where you died (and marked it on the map, and even put the items back in your inventory in their original places), a craftable experience bank, saws to cut down trees quickly, waystones that let you fast-travel, etc.

There were also several magic systems that let you do things like cast magic bolts, heal yourself, repair durability, tame supernatural creatures, transmute materials, create portals between locations, and lots of other things. I made a custom spell that let me super-jump so I could catapult across continents and was mostly limited by the speed that chunks could render. This of course had its own progression system to prevent trivializing other parts of the game.

There’s a lot more that I didn’t get into, like plenty of new mobs (that usually also had lore), bosses, storylines, frankly amazing structures that spawned radomly, new dimensions, equippabled artifacts, and new planets accessible by creating rockets. One of my friends made a colony of villagers to handle resource gathering and even base-expanding, while another created a nuclear power plant that at one point leaked and irradiated essentially the whole continent for days, excluding people who had rad suits. It was much more fun than I’ve ever had in vanilla, and there’s plenty we didn’t even explore.