On a particular Linux system I was recently using wget was not installed by default. Splores in game message was "could not connect to bbs" which led me down a rabbit hole of network checks until I noticed the wget missing error in the terminal. I was running via a pico8.desktop entry without the terminal originally.

Could curl be used as a fallback? Running "curl -L -O" can usually be used as a fallback in many cases. Better yet just use libcurl in the compiled binary and then you don't need wget or any external tools.

Thanks!