Are there stories/missions/ultimate goal in the game?

[lammaer]

Is it just a sandbox to entertain myself, or there are ingame goals what I can work for?
So any kind of story like in Subnautica or Forest.... when I can say "Mission completed", so I completed the game

Or is it like the goal of the game to research and upgrade everything.

[Geauxboy]

No real story line and no real ending to the game. You can technically finish all the missions and consider the game finished and start a new game if you wish or just keep playing. There are no upgrades in the sense of making any particular item more buffed or anything like that, but researching new items will get you access to new/better items. Actually, you don't have to do any mission at all if you don't want to. There will only be two things you won't get access to if you do no missions. The hoverboard and the vtol. The hoverboard is really nice to have though.

If you do decide to get this game, the best piece of advice I can give for a long term playthrough (missions do not need to be done at all) is that there are special events thoughout the year like Halloween for instance. You can have a great advantage for the next year if you develope whatever is needed for that event and use it year after year without having to do it all over again. The only problem so far with all of these special events is that you get the same rewards as the year(s) prior, but I hold out hope that they will change them up eventually.

[Zarinthal]

Missions on launchpad lead to story. It's not wildly in depth but there is a lot of activity. It starts out as what I consider a far too hands-holding tutorial, then quickly spirals into some odd mystery graphic novel that some love and some hate, but that's just how games work, right? ignore that and it's otherwise 100% sandbox and any story related stuff you come across is just some bauble you found and chose to take, ignore or build something around like some new tribal religion based on plutonium. The missions give rewards, but most of it is stuff you can make on your own, some unique stuff with functional enough counterparts. Some of them are super neat, sometimes you just unlock some blueprint, that gives you a reward, and the reward is bites (bytes?) which are the in game trade for unlocking blueprints. The story is....a story. I played well over 1,000 hours early access, when the whole story was some text on the steam page easily summarized as "you exist, stuff exists, you get stuff"so I can say yeah, ignoring the story not only is ok, but I recommend it. Explore the world, find the questions to ask, theorize your own answers as you learn the boundaries of the world. I think the story mode, following the missions on the launchpad, would absolutely ruin a first, or even 4th, play through. In my opinion, it gives you too much too soon in rewards, and in answers to questions you haven't even thought to ask yet. If you play the game for a couple hours and it seems a bit too involved, but you think creative mode would just be boring, then I'd say jump on some missions. Until that sense of wonder runs out, just do your own thing. That's my .02

[Marck]

There is actually a goal in the game that leads to a cutscene and an end screen. You are able to continue playing that particular game after reaching this goal. The goal has to do with the big purple geometric contraptions that you can find on the surface and the core of every planet. You can reach it without doing any mission, but there is a set of missions which guide you to that goal.

There are stories which are tied to missions, namely the Xenobiology (space snail), Rails, and Awakening mission sets. All these stories are part of an overarching game lore.