Beefing up the sandbox aspects is all well and good, but it doesn't seem to me as though they've at all addressed the core complaints with the game: that the journey is repetitive, long and unsatisfying. It's like they're doubling down on the things that were already the game's strengths and ignoring the glaring weaknesses. I guess that they figure that anyone still playing is already done with the journey... though one of the purposes of free updates should be to make the game more appealing for first-time buyers (because that's the only source of income), and I'm not sure how many people who put off buying the game because an empty sandbox game wasn't quite to their taste will buy it now that it's sandbox-ier. At the very least, they could fit in a few things to make the journey and endgame more rewarding while they're beefing up the sandbox.
Anyways, I'd check out the latest update, but, somehow, my savegame got corrupted or overwritten and all of my progress was lost. I don't want to play the game from the beginning again, and redo all of that grinding, especially when the journey has hardly been improved upon. I could do Creative mode, I guess, but the lack of challenge doesn't really appeal to me. It's too bad that this isn't the kind of game where you don't mind or even enjoy starting over. For example, if you lose your world in Minecraft, it may be disappointing, but you don't quit playing; you happily start from scratch again. Imagine how awesome this game could've been if they'd figured out how to do something like that, where each game is a new experience.