My favorite games are Euro Truck Simulator and Elite Dangerous (where I fly a space truck).
Just letting the scenery pass by, enjoying a couple surprises on the way, practicing my docking skills, decorating my cockpit and listening to some old school country or reggae is relaxing as hell after work.
About the power of the hardware, you don't need to worry too much. My NAS is a SBC with 6 ARM cores and 4GB or RAM. It run flawlessly all the services you've listed and more ! (Also, without transcoding for jellyfin).
I don't know if your budget includes Hard disks, but it should be plenty enough to get you an ready made NAS from Synology or other brands, that will give you an easy start with self-hosting.
If you want to go the DIY route. Then I recommend to build yourself a small computer from a Intel N100 motherboard, or the older J5040. From there you can install Open Media Vault, or otherwise the Linux distribution you are the most familiar with, and install Docker. You can check Linuxserver.io for many guides for spinning up docker containers for all of the services you've listed.
+1 for Proxmox, has been a fun experience as there are plenty of resources and helper scripts to get you off the ground, jellyfin was the first thing I migrated from my PC, hardware encoding may give you a bit of a tussle but nothing unsolveable. Also note Proxmox is Debian under the hood, so you may find it easy to work with. I looked into unraid, it seems great if all you're doing for the most part is storage, if you want Linux containers and virtual machines, proxmox js your bet.
I got a small 4 bay 2U server from a friend on the cheap, 1000$ should get you relatively nice new or slightly older used hardware. Even just a PC with a nice amount of drive bays will get you started. And drives are cheap, a raid 1 setup was one of the things I did.
In the end I'll likely get a separate NAS rack server just to segregate functions, but as of now I simply have a Proxmox LXC mounted to my NAS drives and runs samba to expose them.
Tailscale is a nice set and forget solution for VPN access, I ended up going the route of getting an SSL certified domain and beefing up my firewall a bit. The bit I've messed with it it certainly has a learning curve greater than openvpn, but is much more hardened and versatile.
As for pihole, I've found AdGuard Home to be just about a suitable replacement, and can be installed along openwrt, though I have a bit of an unconventional router with 512MB of RAM so YMMV
They never took it from me! Animal Well and Dread Delusion are phenomenal experiences just from the last couple of months. Indies are always generating good games, even when AAA is just following trends.
I only play single player games, but couldn't care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.
People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don't know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.
depends on the game, achievement hunting can be a lot of fun in a game u already love its just more stuff to do and more reasons to play, sure if all the achievements in a game are things like getting all of a collectible or beating certain story missions/quests they are pretty boring but in pdx map simulators for example many of the are interesting run ideas or they indicate where the hand crafted content is at. And despite how much i love the game i dont think i would have played as much of Tyranny as i did if i hadnt decide to get all the achievements.
There used to be an effort made with how you play a game to get achievements. The Orange box was a great example of this. The 'Little Rocket Man' and 'The One Free bullet' achievements both made you play the game in a different way. Sadly now it's mostly just 'play the game' 'collect all the things'.
Only silly people flaunt achievements. I use them as a meta-gaming guideline, which in a good game leads to interesting and fun challenges. In an RPG, it's like a check box for getting every ultimate weapon, fighting every boss, etc.
Can also give me something to do in a game I've played but loved. Retroachevements for instance encouraged me replay SaGa (aka Final Fantasy Legend) with only one character in the team. Wasn't too hard, but definitely a second playthrough thing.
I love any game with a handcrafted map and some exploration. Even Satisfactory, a factory building game, does an excellent job at that. Procedural generation has its uses but lacks soul I guess.
I usually recommend beginners to start with a consumer plastic router and a regular PC as server.
A consumer router with 16 MB of flash and 128 MB of RAM running OpenWRT will be able to do pretty much everything you need from a router including port forwarding, DNS, DDNS, adblocking (like pihole), traffic shaping etc. They can usually be found super cheap and with even better specs (flash and RAM).
A regular PC will use off the shelf components that are cheap to buy used and easy to replace. It also lets you use regular 3.5" hdds as well as 2.5" hdds, ssds, nvmes and anything in between, and it doesn't use USB for that, which is unreliable and prone to a million issues.
Again you don't need super specs for the PC either, the smallest NVME you can find for the system drive and 8 GB of RAM plus a gen 6 Intel CPU will get you started and you can probably get this used for $50.
Use the PC for storage (NAS) and for hosting services, the router for network management, DNS and adblocking. If you know any Linux use it. If you don't, install a ready-made tool and use that.
Buying USB enclosures and mini-pcs limits your options and ties you to cramped, unreliable and proprietary hardware.
You don't need to expose radarr/sonarr to the internet. Only your torrent client needs external access which would be routed through a VPN that offers port forwarding like AirVPN.
For hardware, I'm a big proponent of DIY. A NAS is very expensive and limiting since it has a fixed amount of bays. It's much more econonomial to buy a case that can hold a ton of drives like the Fractal Design Define series and then run your own hardware. I'd suggest 32GB of RAM, a modern i5 CPU with QuickSync (for Jellyfin), and a motherboard that has as many SATA ports as you can get. Check PCPartPicker to compare features and prices.
To run everything, you might look into using Proxmox and then running all your stuff off that in VMs or containers.
I'd probably keep PiHole separate since you only need a RPi3 and you don't want your whole network to go down if you restart the server. The rest can be run off the server.
If he never played the original I think it’s good he starts with it. Black Mess is great, but the original Half Life has a certain historical value (and is still a great game).
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