Finally bought this on the recent sale and played four hours the past couple days. Wandered around and repaired my ship, flew to a planet, found a signal, have slowly wandered around from point to point mining materials to build a base now I’m wandering from point to point trying to unearth buried tech so I can unlock the ability to build base shit out of different materials. Running out of and replenishing resources as I go destroying some random things I’ve found to make room for the stuff I keep using up, because my inventory is about the size of a midgets nut sack.
Holy shit this is tedious and boring. What should I do to experience some other gameplay loop than this?
Don't dork around on one planet. You should have quests that take you off planet, to do the Atlas or Artemis quests.
Or, more likely, you should do the current Expedition from a new save or from your existing save.
Once you start doing the Expedition objectives (they're basically achievements) that should show you around the galaxy a bit. Also a bunch of the steps award more inventory space.
Find your first freighter, start recruiting frigates and other pilots. Start grinding the reps for the different factions, with missions and turnins.
Each new star system you go to has a space station. In each new space station you visit, you can buy 1 inventory slot if you have the cash. You can also get missions that award additional inventory slots.
You can also explore the planet using a Signal Booster to find crashed pods that contain additional inventory slots. Some maps provide maps directory to those pods.
You'll want to get yourself a Minotaur (a giant battlemech that you can ride or run autonomous.)
Endgame right now is a) filling out your fleet of frigates and b) finding Dissonance planets to salvage Sentinel Interceptors because they're cool looking. Every planet has its own algorithmically generated ship, the amount of variance on them is pretty wild. Or getting a Living Ship, those are cool too if you want to fly around in a giant space sperm.
Oh yeah, and there's different kinds of bases. You can have 400+ different bases but you can only have one Settlement. Settlements work quite a bit different from bases, have their own economy and stuff.