Whats the point?

At the end of the day, It's not a realistic survival game. It's a Survival Sandbox game. That means that You have some pretty hefty responsibility to define the rules of play that you engage with in order to have a good time- If you just sit in the sandbox and expect the sand to jump into the shape of a castle, or a dragon, or whatever, You're gonna have a bad time.

Death is meaningless- Unless you enforce a play rule of total loss or permadeath as Mithrandir says. Trader quests are repetetive IF you allow yourself to just run them over and over repetitiously; Some users simply never speak to a trader at all, others like myself limit them to one a day at most.

It's your sandbox. You wield a great deal of power to align the rules in a way that you have fun with. They won't just align themselves for you, it's not a linear story game where all the rules are spelled out and set up ahead of time and you just walk down the linear path to glory.

Originally posted by Socipat: There was suppose to be an actual story to progress through.
My two cents, there is no story. The developers never knew where they were going with the game. Now they need an excuse to drop this game so they can work on their new game.

Even when there is a story, That's not going to be the be-all-end-all.

The story will be a goal to accomplish.. But not THE goal. It's still a sandbox game- Like Minecraft, the game won't 'end' when you complete the story, It just goes on.

Originally posted by AccelToWinYT: The story is what you make the story to be? It's like Kenshi. It would be nice to have some lore though.

There's a fair amount of lore if you pay attention; Spread out more darksouls style, rather than being explicitly informed. The note you start with lends tell to your specific situation as the player, the tutorial quests allude to a power struggle in the region; Carl's corn shows that they were experimenting with genetically engineering some kind of super corn- and that was made with corpses and is possibly a spread vector/location zero of whatever this zombie virus is... There's also newspaper clippings you can find on the ground that give some detail, bomb drop sites and military camps all over tell the tale of the veritable WW3 that killed the world, etc...

In short, Keep an eye out and put your thinking cap on. :) Lore's there in bits and pieces.