[2022] Good old days gone.............

Going to quote Roland on this, since he worded it quite nicely.

People get confused because the game used to not have as many rules and constraints when it was mostly bare bones scaffolding and they think that the game was meant to remain like that. It was not. If you are playing the regular game then you are playing an open world survival game with elements of tower defense and RPG and sandbox. But the main game is not a pure sandbox and is not intended to be.

For a pure sandbox, turn on the creative menu, enable god mode, and choose to either turn off enemies or simply turn off blood moon. Those options give you a pure traditional sandbox where you can do whatever you want and have no constraints or rules to live by.

So the game used to be more sandboxish back when it was more unfinished and rough. Now the game is less sandboxish because it is more developed with rules and conditions. If you prefer sandbox play then you can do it easily by using the options menu and the command console. If you want to play a game with rules but you don't like the rules offered by TFP then you can look for mods that change the rules to what you like better.

So in short, the "good old days" was before the game really reflected what it was supposed to be. Back when there were mere placeholders for systems yet to be developed, or when the developer was testing a feature to see if it would work out how they wanted.

Remember that you are playing a game during Alpha development. You never started playing a finished product. Core systems changing was an absolute given, and still is.