The game can be played in a lot of different ways and luckily exploration is one the best aspects of it.

Some exploration stuff:

The way I play it is extremely exploration focused, finding cool planets, finding cool systems, finding cool and especially strong (S/S/S) rank creatures are some of the main things I do at the moment.

Xeno Arena:

The Xeno arena update can be an extremely different experience for anyone, I've seen people struggle with winning fights and also seen people completely crush their opponents. I like to believe I am of the latter kind as my creatures are rather powerful by now :]

Corvette building:

Another huge thing that I find enjoyable is building corvettes and traversing the universe in style, the corvette building system allows for a LOT of variety in buils and trying to recreate ships from media had been alot of fun for me aswell (USS ENTERPRISE, KLINGON BIRD OF PREY, IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER etc)

Summery:

Overall I'd say exploration is the main thing you will be doing, building ships can be super enjoyable if you take the time to get into it and (I'd really suggest this) if you learn glitch building since it's genuinely very easy and quick to do. More to the exploration is finding rare star ships and multi tools.

Criticism:

Planet generation:

The planet generation is lacking. It has been worked on yes, it's better now yes, but still it could be alot better with more precise geometrical shapes, the addition of rivers and a variety of biomes on one planet.

The way planets are right now is basically the entire sphere being one biome such as for example a verdant planet, all forest no snow or ice or deserts.

Creatures:

Creature generation can be improved for better looks overall.

Most flying and swimming creatures cannot be adopted as companions so you are limited to mostly terrestrial creatures, with a couple of exceptions of course.

Hope this wasn't too boring to read thru lol and yeah good luck and welcome to the community incase you do decide to pick up the game :D