Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it:
https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...
It’s not even in the same ballpark as Elite, NMS, terraria, or Minecraft.
The levels are all hand drawn, not generated by an algorithm, even if they’re shuffled. Eric Barone, the developer, has publicly said as much. Are you calling him a liar?
It’s like the difference between sudoku/crossword and conways game of life
Someone lying about the pseudo randomization of the hand drawn efforts to make it seem entirely algorithmically generated rubs me really wrong, especially when that dev has publicly broadcast the reasoning of the decision to eschew procedurally generated mines.
bombcar said "They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation." (which is true - you confirmed as much in the very next comment - "The levels are all hand drawn, not generated by an algorithm, even if they’re shuffled.". That's all early Diablo was doing.)
"Quasi-generated" seems like an appropriate descriptor here - stringing together level building blocks algorithmically is still "generating" a level in a sense. You're right - it's not correct to say that they were generated in the same way that an LLM generates things, but a) nobody claimed that and b) there is an undeniable element of procedural generation here.