I really wasn’t a part of the early NMS hate and didn’t start playing in earnest until a couple major updates were released. Since then, it’s been a game I come back to every so often. I’ve played through every expedition with a new save, though I have had to start deleting saves to make room for more. I treat each save as their own character with their own color scheme for ships, bases, and appearance. After the expedition is over, I often spend some time building bases, etc. before moving on to a new game for a while.
Going through my various saves and building different styles of corvettes has been fun. I’ve only done one particular large build that ran into the corvette part limit (I hit the base part limit all the time). I actually like making fairly practical, compact corvettes.
My original, Normal save has been maxed out for ages. It got to the point I had to delete entire bases because I had hit, not the base part limit, but the save part limit. I literally couldn’t place anything else. So while I go back to that save once a while, there’s not much for me to do.
My attachment to an Expedition save varies. I’ve had some I played a lot afterwards and some I couldn’t be bothered. Those were the first to get deleted when I ran out of slots. Some of the early expedition routes are ghost towns of bases, like Pioneers, which was the first expedition. Some of the newer ones are still pretty active though, like Utopia and Aquarius. If I load either of those saves, there are still people traversing the systems.
It’s funny though that some expeditions did not seem to capture people, like The Cursed. I never see anyone if I load that save. Could just be timing or it could be people just didn’t enjoy that expedition enough to stick around.
If you’re kinda looking for a reason to play, you can always set yourself a mission. I took one of my expedition saves, Polestar I think, and turned a system into a Status Device farm, which requires the system to have the right kind of planets and building one base on each planet so they can all be uploaded.
https://photon.lemmy.world/post/lemmy.world/21002664
At the moment, I am slowing going through my active saves and building corvettes.