I played the demo during the Steam Greenlight? event/deal/thing back in October last year, could be wrong on the dates. It was a lot of fun and played great on my system. Definitely gunna pick it up.

It's certainly similar to Valheim but I wouldn't necessarily put them together, closer to Palworld, Ark or V Rising (if you ignore the camera orientation). Build system is very similar to Palworld & V Rising and not nearly as robust or complex as Valheim. When I played the demo, the world was static, not a random seed generator, another big difference from Valheim. I haven't had a chance to try out the recent quest system added to Valheim so I can't compare the two faithfully but Enshourded definitely seems to focus on quests more than Valheim. While Valheim has a story/lore, it's not as prominent or "center stage" as Enshourded. Combat was really fun, it was a bit clunky or possibly just "different" but I remember a small learning curve to it.

I have over 500 hours in Valheim and the build system is my favorite part so that might be skewing my perception on the similarities a bit. If I remember correctly, this is made by the same devs that did Portal Knights, which I really enjoyed playing. There are some elements to Enshourded that remind me of Portal Knights as well so that would add up.

Thanks for doing the digging! This should be in the FAQ at a minimum, otherwise it comes off predatory and exploitative. Its well understood that "free" services cost something to run and maintain, so be up front and honest about how you recoup the costs. Only mentioning it in the T&Cs is not being up front.

I selfhost SearXNG via Unraid and have it plugged in as my default search engine in Firefox. Occasionally there might be an issue with one of the providers but I've found there's usually an update pending that I just need to run which fixes the problem. I haven't heard anything negative from my users as of yet though.