[2021] can someone explain leveling and specilization now?

Originally posted by Kane Markoff: The devs in all of their wisdom have added to the skill tree and how it works and in doing so making the base game for players more complex yet also less fun. Best advice I can give is join a low collab server to be able to build how you want. Even then however you are limited now by building requirements, you can no longer have motared stone floors and the rest being wood. It must all be of a certain material and the newer the table you build the newer the material you need to build your structure out of for it to work.
The game can still be fun but if you want how it used to be the best is a low collab server and even then you may not have much fun as you'll hit road blocks for certain skills and how you used to build and play.

At least the room requirements for tiered blocks have been there since way before Steam release, so this hasn't really been any different. In the opposite, we added a lot of new blocks into the different tiers to give more variety.