I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Terraria hit a good spot for me. Was minecraft with things to actually discover underground. Can get to be more action-y when you do the bosses and such... but overall the game was magical just digging endlessly in a direction to see what weird stuff came up.
But my top tier is heavily modded Bethesda games. The vanilla games are... fine.. but the moddability really opens up to make it what you want. Id layer on hundreds of mods, some survival, some just cool additions like a mod that might make autumn leaves fall from certain trees, or add nature sounds throughout the whole world, mods to make your character get tired the more they run so you have to set up camp in a safe spot every so often, spells require components so you have to learn the native plantlife to know which to scavenge for, that kind of thing. You use the mediocre quests the base game gives you as a reason to start traveling in a direction, but you end up setting up camp in the wilderness staring at the stars outside a random castle ruin you found that you might explore in the morning. It requires a good bit of willpower to set up the mods how you like em, but there's nothing like it once you do.
Wabbajack is a project nowadays that let's you clone super stable modlists. Might find some good baselines through that. I wouldn't know.. I got down the modding rabbit hole a decade ago and havent gotten out to actually play in ages.
There's a game called Eastshade that I might play sometime that looks like skyrim exploration... but instead of quest being combat, they're instead quests to paint various scenes across the land. Seems like a quality wanderlust game. Haven't yet played though
7 Days to Die is another one that requires some elbow grease. It's a pretty shitty zombie Sim game that devolves into silly base defense every 7 days with waves of zombies and turrets and stupid pit traps, etc. But I installed a mod called Undead Legacy, tweaked the spawn/difficulty settings to my liking, and installing a custom worldgen instead of using the base map, and then played it on ironman mode where I literally restarted if I ever died. It was pretty janky, but somehow magical. Exploring through the wilderness, scouting out towns and scavenging for supplies, taking everything leisurely/slow and methodical so I didn't get myself killed. Ended up being very calming but paranoid wanderlust feel with spikes of adrenaline survival. I want to give project zomboid a go sometime for the same feel/goals
That's my problem, though, no one's truly made a perfect wanderlust game.. so I've always had to twist games that are close to my liking. I think the wanderlust genre is a bit of a personal genre in that way. The ambience and various dials need to be just right for you as an individual to truly lock in and get lost in it. And it almost always takes some mentality shifts on your part too. Not fast traveling, maybe even just walking slowly and smelling the flowers, etc. But its nice to have a compelling game ecosystem around that too.
I thought Bethesda was sure to come up! I did play heavily modded Skyrim back in the day, when things were run through a Nexus of some sort; I don´t know if it became enshittified, but it seems like they had the mod thing pretty well handled. I also played a lot of Fallout 3, and was so happy when I could get rid of the green glow, which is not only ugly, but unrealistic. Chernobyl is a beautiful wild paradise now.
I've played Zomboid and I think it's a pretty small town, and survival is really always the top priority. Never consider it an exploration game.
Yes, it does seem that what you like is PROXIMAL to a few other much more profitable genres; thank the gods for mods.
I'll look into the Undead Legacy mod thanks.