paladin181: ... Well, after grinding resources and realizing I have no inventory space, then having to grind more, by the time I reached the third planet and found a random space station, for some trade, I'd literally just given up. There's no point in forcing this much resource grinding.
I watched a gameplay video from some guy that was pretty upset about the game, saying that you basically go around one planet from location to location with there being about 5 or 6 different "base" styles you can encounter and all the others are duplicates of those spaced randomly, then you either get a multi-tool upgrade which is usually 1 upgrade slot bigger than what you have (or 1 smaller), or you find a suit inventory slot upgrade station that upgrades one slot at a time at an ever increasing price, or you might find a communication beacon that shows you the location of a crashed ship which might be 1 slot better or worse than the ship you currently have. So apparently you travel grinding from location to location just to desperately seek out 1 slot upgrades to each of the 3 (space suit, ship, multi-tool weapon) more or less indefinitely, and the goal of the game is to mine resources on every planet with which you can pay for some of these upgrades. The point of getting the upgrades being so that you can mine resources faster to buy the next upgrade to mine faster to buy the next upgrade to mine faster to...
Also, a buddy of mine said that he's went from planet to planet within a solar system including the moons and every planet's shape and overall topography is exactly the same. He said sure, they're randomly generated procedurally but it's like a lawn full of grass - every lawn looks different if you took a photo of it and analyzed it mathematically for randomness - but from 6 feet off the ground all lawns look exactly the same. The difference is the colours used on each planet to make it more colourful etc. He said every planet's caves are essentially identical, and that the alien bases you find are identical on every single planet and moon without any differentiation. The dialogue with aliens consists of them mumbling stuff in alien gibberish that you slowly decode by learning one word of the language at a time, and that even after you understand every word the conversations make no sense and you're left with 2 or 3 choices with which you have to solve an alien riddle that half the time you just have to make a random guess and if you guess right you win some item or upgrade and if you guess wrong the alien race shuns you and your status with them goes down.
He's travelled to two other star systems he said and they were more or less identical to the first one in terms of diversity. He said the game play is exactly the same on every planet. He also said that when you launch your ship off the ground to fly around to find the next base, there is a chance that you will be randomly shot off into space off planet for no apparent reason and have to travel back to the planet if that is not what you intended, and that just flying around not far off the ground sometimes is enough to make the game send you into space unintended. Sounds like this game is pretty buggy.
My buddy also ended up mining some resource sticking out of the ground and it kept going into the ground deeper and deeper so he kept mining it because it was a rare mineral. Eventually he went through the bottom and fell into the inside of the planet looking at the land above in this limbo world, and fell into radiated water that he couldn't see. He had to fly around with his jetpack and try to blow a hole in the invisible land-roof to be able to try to fly back out.
From what my buddy and some videos on youtube have discovered so far, it seems like this game was released before it was ready and is very buggy, and the gameplay is severely limited in diversity from what the developers said about the game over time. Of course this is all second hand information, but it seems to be common thoughts out there if one goes reading reviews and forum posts, reddit etc. as well as youtube playthroughs.