One of the better crafting systems i've seen in a game with a huge tier ceiling of gear and a lot of loot unique to specific parts of the map.

The way exploration works is you have a huge map with tiles. You select a tile on the map and each and every tile is its own level, making for an incredible amount of world to explore.

The tiles except for towns and dungeons are fully destroyable top to bottom and you can build anywhere except towns and dungeons so about 98% of the game is your open world to do whatever you want in.

I've done a small handful of quests and most gave me access to dungeons which are cool, all with their own secrets to hunt down which is a ton of fun and now i'm treating it more as a open ended adventure as a nameless adventurer and largely ignoring the story and quests because exploring and building my house and farm is satisfying.

I have almost all of the map unlocked, I'm raising too many chickens and pigs, and my garden takes 30 minutes to farm every rotation because there really is no limit to how big your base can be, it can even stretch across every map on every tile if you wanted it to which is massive. Finding NPCs and bringing them home from the wild is pretty neat since it lets you build your own village basically.

I'd like to see more diverse mini biomes and area hazards like lava pools in the next game so you can't just dig straight down and have to put in more thought to navigating when digging but that aside, this is a load of fun. The rain and thunderstorms are very atmospheric and fighting in them gives a nice immersive rush.

If you like terraria or aground then give this a try, it has a lot of the same feel to it. They aren't the same games but those two and this game scratches a lot of the same itches that so few others even begin to scratch.

Beware the zombie sheep.