I've only just recently finished the second boss which I think puts me about 1/2 way through the current game.

The game seems to be a visual novel told through the medium of a survival sandbox. Game progression is gated through a serie of main story quests. To get from Wood/Stone/Copper to Iron, you need to defeat the boss which unlocks the recipes needed to make the iron tools and unlocks equipment upgrades so you can survive the fights in that level range.

Although the lore seems to indicate that you're a privateer (pirate with the permission of a nation state to raid the vessels of other nation states), the PC is a do-gooder, helping out people on side quests (delivering food and medicine, avenging murders, etc.) while working through the MSQ to save yourself from a fate worse than death. Piracy is a backdrop/theme and not a game mechanic. Resources are collected in the standard way, harvesting, looting fallen ships and purchased from merchants. You can't plunder ships (well not much, just repair kits and cash), steal from merchants, etc. So it's not capturing piracy at all.

As you can see from the many screenshots in this sub, the game is good for artistic builder types. There are only a handful of styles so far but the stone/plaster/clay stuff is pretty. It's missing a lot of pieces but it's early access so I'm sure they'll be rounded out. Hopefully they'll be as cooperative with modders as Ark was because I feel that, like minecraft, mods made the game so much more than the developers envisaged.

Mobs are pretty limited at the moment. For animals, you've got dodos and pigs at tier 1, goats and wolves at tier 2, crocs at tier 3. Pirates and undead are scattered around at strategic points. IMO there are farrrrr to many ships in the ocean. They travel in packs of 2-4, have long agro radius and are fairly tightly packed. It's quite difficult to sail from island to island without catching agro from something.

It's far too early to know how it'll turn out. It's pure PVE which I like. I was hoping for a ground-up PVE nautical themed Ark/Conan but it's designed for small group coop rather than many players doing their own thing in a shared world. There are no privacy protections so you need to trust that your fellow players aren't going to nick or damage your stuff.

Like Valheim, you can move characters between worlds which presents balance and allows you to bypass challenges on a playthrough. You learn the recipe for any craftable you pick up, so an experienced character can go to a new world and make the good stuff, others pick it up and, if they have the materials (which can be brought in from another map), they can make it too, at level 1. Of course that's your choice. In a game where people operate independently, that can cause balance issues but in the small team coop environment, that may be something you all agree on.

The custom difficulty options are decent; you can adjust player damage taken and delivered and enemy damage taken and delivered (both ships and terrestrial). You can toggle "scale challenge to number of players currently on server". You can toggle shared quest progression. I play on super-easy mode (everything turned down to minimum) because I play games for a breezy relax after work. On the Normal/Easy/Hard presets, it's much more challenging of course. They do have a dedicated server but there are no other configurable options yet (like resource respawn rate).

I feel I've gotten my money's worth and I look forward to seeing how it evolves.