so, whats the state of the game

[Solar]

last time i played was in 2020... how notably have things changed since?

[Elucidator]

It's incomplete, buggy and goalless.
Basically, it is far more complex and offers more things than minecraft, but you can tell it feels kinda empty, expecially when you increase the world size. It's also easy to get confused, since for example:

- I'm playing the dutch version. The developer is a dutch person, yet for some reason there are these silly translation issues.
Where you quest may say ' make a "Kaastaart" ' --> cheesy pie
and your recipes will say "Kwark taart". --> soft cheesecake
- Another quest will say "Please give me ice cream" (in dutch)
apparently there was a notification that I unlocked a recipe, but there was no recipe in my recipe book with ice in it, so I-- thought it was a bug. There was no indicator on what it was or how specific..
So, completely confused, I ended up buying strawberry ice cream. It didn't work.
I bought chocolate ice cream... it didn't work either.
then I realized I needed a specific ice cream, so I waited for half the year searching for this mystery ice recipe, hoping I could craft it or to see what else concerning ice would show up on the store, but it never arrived.
.... it turns out that I needed to buy the recipe from the Honey.Comb thing. (which is also badly translated in some of the help and quests)

...
Riah's quest for bottles seems to mess up the events in town. If you wish at the lakes that appear during winter, you will catch red bottles 100% of the time, which you apparently normally get from the mine cave lake, rarely. This prevented me from doing the seasonal event.

When you play multiplayer, all members get the sign to create a specific house or shop, and the sign cannot be thrown away, or placed into most items. Thankfully it can be placed inside a blue storage crate, which when broken drops the sign and lets it disappear.
(multiple bugs yes)

GPU usage is maxed out, but not with the console edition. (no clue why, I have a newer GPU than I did before and the performance isn't different)

Snow falling from the sky during rain in winter doesn't always work till you reload the game.

Time progresses on a day waay too quickly imo. The default farm has a length, if you start seeding in the morning, and place a row of 20 seeds along the entire length of the arm, you will barely make it before midnight. Why would you do that? Well, most things cost money. .. and you need to make buildings and just experimenting with a section of a building means that it is now evening. And the evening is very dark, which means all the colors of your blocks will no longer be visible. Sigh- also you can't be in two places at once. Anyway, for multiplayer the short length per say means you cannot spend time chatting or using emotes, or just trading in general. I wish the time progression could be slowed down slightly to accomodate for multiplayer and people logging in later.

Basically all you can do in game is grind.
And finding queen bees is already difficult.
but once you have a stockpile of money (100.000 leafs) then you can start building and buying stuff that you'll dispose off later to try out things (since a lot of furnature costs 5000 and blocks easily cost that much too) -- also this gives you plenty of room to buy more seeds if you fail.
and of course buy sprinklers, which... will drain your wallet very quickly.

Also the main menu is broken. If you click new game, create world, then back, then create world again you get a different menu. xd

[Claymore]

I second a lot of the above. It really is unfinished imo. Like it's a complete game TECHnically speaking, but it's buggy, laggy, really bad resource loading... The events overlap, can cause conflicts with story content as above.

It's more fun if you just cheat, which isn't something you want to say about a game. I DO like that it's an option as a baseline, though. So if you feel the day cycle is too fast, or if you're stuck and really frustrated, you can just stop time or spawn a thing.

I think it would reinvigorate the community and we'd see more mods (which is also a really, really cool baseline feature with the steam workshop compatibility) if they fixed the lag/freezing/quest + event issues/disappearing weather issues.

It's a solid start. Beautiful foundation, love the stylization! Just needs some polish, including quest directions.