Mechanite

That looks like it could be a cool gift for my dad, what exactly is it called?

I've played oblivion and Skyrim before, it was just Morrowind I stayed away from

I just finished Morrowind for the first time a few weeks ago, vanilla other than using openmw. It has aged a lot better than I expected it would have. I can definitely see why people say it's their favorite TES, and I'm not talking with any kind of nostalgia.

How is this game compared to something like Banished? No city builder has been as fun as banished for me

I use the steam deck preset with yuzu. I also changed the resolution to 900p and increased the framecap to 40 fps and menu to 90 IIRC

I also lowered draw distance slightly. Can't remember if I made any other adjustments

I've got totk running at around 30-40 fps with some hitches using TOTK optimizer https://github.com/MaxLastBreath/TOTK-mods/releases

You can't buy me off, Burger Man!

I've had one of these running for years, honestly I didn't expect it to last this long as it looks really cheap

If whatever you're doing works with av1 then I'd say go for it. I do AV1 for Plex since all of my devices can hardware decode, however I keep my own videos at h264 software encoded (for smaller filesizes) since Synology photos doesn't support AV1.

I use tdarr for my large scale conversions to AV1 but I use shutterencoder for everything else. It's like handbrake but friendly for working in large batches and the UI is really nice https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/ It will add H265 to the end of the name too

Today I learned yt-dlp has sponsorblock built in

Yeah if any dealerships near me ever had any in stock I probably would have bought one by now on impulse, I wish you could purchase it without any kind of dealership intervention though