I think I've reached the sandbox stage, but not sure

[Krash Megiddo]

I bit of background about me: I have over 5,000 hours logged in Elite Dangerous, have all the toys and multibillion credits I can't spend, and know what its like to work on skills or exploration or endless trade routes. I'm just wondering if I've reached that point in NMS.

NMS has superior missions, but I'm not sure what to do next with them:
The Atlas Path: Find the next Atlas Interface. I thought I was done with that and the mission path looks like a yellow path to the Galactic center.

The Space Anomaly: Explore the new reality? I have no idea what this means.

New Beginnings: I have this new galaxy to explore and TBH it looks just like my starting galaxy. I chose the Green orb, for what its worth.

Both galaxies have a path for me to follow to the galactic core. Is there something there worth finding? In Elite, that journey takes a couple hundred jumps and when you get there its like, "is that it?"

[Dirak2012]

The Atlas path asking you to find the next station is a bug, you can ignore it,
Space Anomaly, is the hub where you can buy blueprints and interact with other players, that is not really a quest, but it stays there forever.
New beginnings is just telling you that the game is endless and you can keep exploring forever.

If you are looking for hard objectives, you are done. Going to the center will just send to the next galaxy in the sequence (there are 255 galaxies). If you don't enjoy just playing in the sandbox, you can quit now. However NMS was never about quest or objectives.

[Krash Megiddo]

Thanks for confirming. I have a couple of goals yet such as getting a living ship and S Class freighter. I look forward to starting over and avoiding the mistakes from this playthrough.