That does seem quite long. There's a lot of writing to the hard drive and multithreading use there, it usually should take seconds even on older machines, but I'm afraid I don't own the Steam Deck to verify what could cause this.

Pulled mine out to test this and I confirm it's taking several minutes, 3 minutes in and the bar is only just past the first G in Generating.
Performance metrics are showing the GPU ranging from 0%-5% typically hovering around 1%
CPU is hovering around 17-18% with a max of around 20%. Each core seems to be sharing it evenly.
VRAM is sitting at 0.5 GiB
RAM is sat at 2.7 GiB
Frame count in the app is taking intermittent plummets.

Not sure if any of this helps.
If the GPU is supposed to be doing the heavy lifting during the world gen then it certainly isn't doing it.

Interacting with buttons such as cycling the Recipes tab has upto a second of lag at times during this loading process.

Streaming from desktop to deck has no issues as expected.

Originally posted by AngerMittens:

Pulled mine out to test this and I confirm it's taking several minutes, 3 minutes in and the bar is only just past the first G in Generating.
Performance metrics are showing the GPU ranging from 0%-5% typically hovering around 1%
CPU is hovering around 17-18% with a max of around 20%. Each core seems to be sharing it evenly.
VRAM is sitting at 0.5 GiB
RAM is sat at 2.7 GiB
Frame count in the app is taking intermittent plummets.

Not sure if any of this helps.
If the GPU is supposed to be doing the heavy lifting during the world gen then it certainly isn't doing it.

Interacting with buttons such as cycling the Recipes tab has upto a second of lag at times during this loading process.

Streaming from desktop to deck has no issues as expected.

This sounds like the bottleneck could be writing to the hard drive. I'll try to think of something, thank you for this.

Thanks to great help from fijero on Discord, it seems there is a solution to speed up Steam Deck world generation, and the problem is software-related. Swapping the compatibility settings to Proton 7.0 seems to fix the issue.