Question from a complete beginner

Some are about the missions and world, some are about building. Generally speaking, this game is about vehicles (or creations). That's the central thing that keeps 'builders' and 'drivers' together, playing for thousands of hours.

Missions get old really fast, but there's an infinite amount of creations-content to be played and produced. If you're staying it will be for the vehicles and all the cool shit they do.

There's no right or wrong way of playing it. Personally, I have 1700 hours and not 5% of that was playing career, I drive my vehicles mainly for testing. I've met people with more hours than me who do not build at all. So it depends on you.

Building can be challenging, but unlike KSP, you don't start at rocket science level challenge. You can overcome most things with badly designed vehicles. But doing them well, efficiently and with style is the real deal.

If you like designing stuff to overcome challenges, listen to me, there's nothing better than this. It's like sugar for your brain. You won't be able to stop.

Well my friend, I bought this game back in October of 2020 on the same thoughts that you had. I first started on campaign because I love the aspects of the search and rescue gameplay, and eventually earned enough to buy a larger base to build larger ships/ helicopters.

Once I bought the base I swapped to a creative world to design a helicopter and ship to carry said helicopter specifically for use in campaign.

Basically, I realized that campaign mode is really tedious. You need to spend money to refuel your vehicles, everytime you enter the workbench and respawn your vehicle it charges you the full cost to respawn it. Refuel stations are far apart so just traveling there you could potentially use a ton of your fuel.

Now I spend all my time designing vehicles that could be used in campaign should I ever want to return to it, and with every vehicle I build I learn something new and use that information to build yet another new one.

The game is great, it tests your creativity along with your knowledge of engineering. If you bought it for campaign, like I originally did, then you messed up. But take my word for it, designing vehicles is an absolute blast!

Sandbox will definitely take up a lot of your time, but you can get closer to the 50/50 by doing a few things:

1. Build one hull, save it, and build multiple ships from it

2. things like cranes, doors, lifeboats, engines, etc should be built once and saved, so you don't redesign the wheel every game

3. when building a vehicle, think of as many things that can go wrong as possible, and build some safeguards against them. It will save you aloooooot of time in campaign!

Although I spend a lot of time building and getting my ships right I do design them to be functional for campaign use (I also do all my building in campaign but as you can imagine that's not the best way but at least it keeps me within a budget and means I incrementally improve my ships as I earn more). This can be tedious as others have said though and the missions can get annoying if you don't have the right capabilities.

It's a balancing act and you might find you prefer the building to the playing. I'm only just starting to get into the automation and logic side of things with the new engines and as they add more features with every update it'll keep you coming back for different reasons (the new fire mechanics and first person stuff is really bringing it to life and there's more to come like natural disasters).

Eventually as multiplayer improves too I imagine there will be really fun roleplay communities for both builders and players.

Mine is probably 75% designing, 25% using the creation

I would say its up to the player. Personally I enjoy the design process and probs spend about 98% of my time in game designing my creations but also when I started playing the game over 500 hours ago I spent probably 70% of my time exploring and doing missions, so I would say that it's open world and really up to the player.

I've been playing since 2018, personaly I'm a perfectionist, but I still do about 50/50, cuz my boats are relatively slow. But first youll start learning how to build boats, you will go from slow and uneficient boats and probably end at fast and efficient. Also personaly I really like the logic and freedom in this game. You need to always be wanting to learn in this game, or just use workshop builds.

Depends how you play. I do 10% building and 90% using on my multiplayer modded career(which if youre interested in joining you're welcome to contact me) I'd strongly recommend not using the workshop. And I'd strongly recommend you play classic career over standard career

From what i notice the game is obviously much more focused on the building/driving part than the actual rescue part. The AI is so-so, movement is weird since your character is the fastest runner/swimmer alive and the highest jumper in history (Quake movement scheme?) and the building section has much more depth in it. Of course what you do in the game is up to you, but to me the "rescue" part was much less enjoyable than actually just downloading a submarine in the game and messing around.

I have never even tried to make vehicles to carry out missions, I always just made what I thought was cool at the time. But I would assume u should spent a lot more time in the editor than carrying out the missions. It does depend heavily on u tho and how much u work on the vehicle logic and appearance wise

Its very good game but I only use the steam workshop to use others creations so far I have 281 hours

I play allot literally every day and ya missions are fun but I manly spend time building and checking out workshop creation's but obviously, I like it a lot best game ever