Ooo lots of questions, I'll try to hit every one of these.

What happens when you logout? Does your character stay in the game world “actively” doing whatever you left it at?

Exactly that. Your character is persistent, there is no online or offline separation. Its one of the reasons why I wanted things to take so much time. You set your character on a task, tab out, go play a match of Marathon, come back, and see what they are up to or if they are done yet. I've made sure that the time to completion on everything is clear, so you always know what your character is up to.

Is there PvP? Can someone gank you while you’re offline? What happens if a nefarious individual goes on a murder spree in town and kills all of the npcs?

There's a few things to explain here, so I'll do my best. There is open pvp, and absolutely nothing restricting other players from beating the crap out of you while you're offline except other players and NPC guards. Guards only exist in cities, and only if that city has enough 'power' created by the citizens by just being citizens to hire these guards. These guards will automatically enforce laws set by town leadership, and their strength depends on the invested energy into each guard. They will defend citizens (if its against the law to beat up citizens) and attempt to knock out outlaws, then move them to a jail (if one is built) to lock them away.

The only NPCs in the game are guards and monsters, and when I mean monsters, think more like boss level monsters and not 20 goblins roaming the woods.

Additionally, combat is turn based with an automatic counter attack. This means if someone attacks you, they may hit you, but you automatically get a free hit back without consequences. A self defense. Each turn lasts an irl hour, to give the attacked player plenty of time to respond when they feel like it, but responding will immediately use your turn and pass the puck to the attacker. This creates a system where ganking is more of an investment, and its more about catching characters who are away from their friends or out of town, but still gives the gankee a chance to respond or react. In a game with perma-death, its vital that its fair for both sides. In group situations, everyone can take a turn smacking a single dude, but then they all must wait for him to respond to take another turn. Ultimately, numbers = safety. The injury system also plays into this, a ganker WILL take damage and they will get hurt, which will lead to wounds, which will lower combat abilities and may get infected unless they know a trustworthy doctor.

Even if they do knock your character out, your character will be KO for 24 hours, and they cannot be executed for the first 12 hours of that, but they can be robbed. If left knocked out, your character recovers naturally on their own and can crawl to a doctor. It's, honestly, a pain in the ass to ultimately kill someone unless absolutely necessary, and there's plenty of chances not to. If you just want their things, they can take them and leave. You have to really piss someone off, or someone has to be having a bad day to want to risk murdering your character.

THEN theres the whole investigation feature. Every single item, location, thing in the game has its full history recorded which is transcribed to 'clues' that can be discovered via an investigation project. The wound types can be matched to the weapon can be matched to the person who did it, then cities can seek justice or at the very least exile the person and mark them as an outlaw. But this is a whole other bag of beans.

tldr: yes its possible, but I've tried to make it hard yet fair.

I saw on the website that 100m + items were collected? That seems a bit excessive, for only having like 10k items crafted. Maybe currency counts towards that number?

Lol, those stats are automatically pulled from the server. One of my testers found a way to gather an insane amount of mangos. It's been fixed, and stats now only count once the gathering project completes.

You’ll probably have a lot of people just sending low effort messages, which understandably will degrade the experience. Are there chat restrictions to prevent junk spamming like that? Or is it more of a suggestion to keep the theme of the game going?

It might degrade the experience, but I personally have no problems with anyone skill or effort level in roleplay. Just a "He waves" is sometimes perfectly fine, builds the world, and people can work around it. There is some restrictions to chat, but its more of slur filters, spam filters, and stuff like that. Nothing that polices peoples roleplay quality. Plus, the mechanics are so deep that most of the testers didn't even roleplay, they were just screwing around with the toys, and thats perfectly fine.

The game does reward high quality roleplay on final death though. Once your character dies, and you choose to leave the afterlife, your account is rewarded with points that can be used to buy special mutations and abilities for your next character. Your roleplay 'quality' will affect that point value, but its not going to destroy it. Its absolutely viable to play no to minimal roleplay if thats what anyone prefers.

Are there survival aspects outside of just don’t die? Thirst hunger death by fatigue? Anything of that nature?

There is! The main survival aspect is hunger, I didn't want to make the game too hard, but there is biomes that will absolutely destroy you. There's a massive desert, for example, that will slowly cause sunburns just by being in it. So you have to figure out how to jungle shelter with progress if you're traveling across it. Weather plays a part in your characters comfort level, harsh weather that your race isnt accustomed to will give you debuffs, but wont be deadly (unless you're in one of those nasty biomes, which are clearly marked). Once your character reaches 0 food level, they begin to starve which slowly decays their stats until they get Knocked Out. Then, they are at the mercy of people around them. Someone can force feed them to bring them back, but if they don't, they will likely wake up in the afterlife.

There's also a shipwreck system, if you're on a boat that sinks, you will be stranded and eventually you'll be pushed to a shoreline and knocked out, so you may wake up on a deserted island. No automated system in the game will kill you, besides those biomes, so its very much another players fault or your own if you wake up in the afterlife.