I'd suggest considering playing the story mode, though - the scary is, indeed, scary, but with time you'll get used to it.
I've actually gotten kind of ballsy with my explorations on story mode, lately. Just going outside in the pitch-black night overhead, not a care in the world.
I need to trigger more of the enemies spawning, to be honest.
To be honest, my ADHD brain can't comprehend the 6 paragraph you made because I'm not in the mood for reading :I. But to be honest I don't have a lot of beef with Story Mode, I even found it fun and challenging. Finding time more valuable, keeping sure my TRs and servers are keeping up, and avoiding foes at night while I get those Hashcodes. While also encountering events makes me feel like there's more than just scary signals
I like ambience cause you can just sit back, smoking cr@ck, putting lots of pride flags in front of your base, watching J from Murder drone flirting you on your custom plasma TV, asking your Omega Kerfur to have S€x, while you ramble about the economy being shit as you found out the printer cost $1500
I love it
