>building your own ship
fun, but extremely tedious for similar reasons as salvaging or flipping - the auto-build/auto-repair/auto-salvage UI is TERRIBLE, speeding up time creates massive cumulative time-loss as your character stands still between animations, and you'll for the most part have to manually lay everything you want out. piece. by. fucking. piece. this is to say nothing of the fact that the bigger your ship gets the laggier the game gets and the harder it becomes to dock with stations and other ships because of how the game handles the actual docking process - with your ship being a map, and docking with anything else combining those maps, forcing every ship design to have a huge proboscis in front, as the airlock and "map connection point" needs to be foremost on all ships.
this, of course, also locks you into specific design frameworks as anything not "facing" north relative to your screen orientation won't make sense in flight
>hauling cargo between planets
PLANET. SINGULAR. there's venus orbital station, and there's ganymed's azikiwe station where you start, among a few other hole-in-the-wall placeholders floating around azikiwe that all look the same and have no real content to be found
>hiring crew and taking care of their needs
barely functional and more trouble than it's worth, like the entire "social combat" system: nonsensical loops of saying "fuck cops" and asking about the weather over and over and over to raise pointless mood meters like "autonomy" and "intimacy" and "family"
>ship racing
give me a fucking break. i don't think a single person on earth has been able to do this yet in game and there's zero footage of it