I will come out of the gate swinging and say that I think there are people who are having trouble or frustrations with this update that do not see the bigger picture. A vast majority of build 42 was adding in systems that improve the longevity of the game and adding more ways that players could use to interact with the world and not get bored as soon as they hit a feeling of relative safety.

I continue to see sentiment that this update "Doesn't feel like it was made for single player" which surprises me because I have to ask if we were reading the same blog posts for the past 2-3 years. The Indie Stone have pushed their vision and ideas on this sort of update time and time again, and it in all honesty feels as though it's going over a lot of people's heads.

02-17-2022, \"Holy Cow\": Dev's commenting on the idea that new professions and crafting skills will be suited to working together with one another.

The devs have stated before, a few times now actually, that a lot of these new systems are more suited to things like Multiplayer, or small group play. In addition, things like the new crafting skills add things that are meant to be utilized FAR FURTHER INTO THE GAME.

https://preview.redd.it/3x2clpy9x19e1.png?width=810&format=png&auto=webp&s=a7349f1f5636f2a1955308bc8fe66ab5fb0d8640

It feels bad to see that people don't see a point in most of the additions that build 42 brought because the main reason for their implementation isn't something that players often need to worry about in most playthroughs.

The new crafting, revamped farming, new fishing, animals, etc etc, it all ties into each other at a point in the game that you, more often than not, do not reach in solo play, and it's difficult to experience all these features by yourself when the devs are clearly trying to make these sort of things something you need to specialize into, and not something that you can just "learn".

Seeing comments like this:

A horse would be invaluable to a survivor, or a dog. Even hostile animals like wolves, coyotes, bears etc would be interesting and add varied danger to the world... but here's some sheep/chicken/etc. They don't die to zombies or anything, they don't even attract them by default, they walk in circles and will spawn a wool item or eggs if you babysit their needs by doing tedious chores, totally negligible when you can loot food in any house or find intact clothes on any corpse.

is incredibly heartbreaking because it does nothing to further the conversation. You wanted hostile, or friendly NPCs. That's what you wanted. That's not what this build is about.
Furthermore, it's just devaluing the entire reason for these animals in the first place, and that is LONG TERM FOOD/MATERIAL SOURCES.

What do you do when there's no more food to be found? You farm, hunt, or forage for it. Yes, in a vacuum where you are the only person to ever set foot in any town, the only person to ever loot anything, etc etc, they don't serve as big a role as they are intended to because food isn't a scare commodity for ONE PERSON living in an entire town by themselves.

And this goes for EVERYTHING btw.

• Why should I craft weapons instead of finding one that is more readily available?
  • If there aren't weapons to be found, now you can craft them with materials that ARE available
• Why should I engage with animals when I can just find food
  • Animals are important if food is no longer reliably abundant

Scarcity is the name of the game, and most of the time, if you're playing single player, you won't hit this benchmark.

tl;dr

Build 42 is filled with systems that are not only unfinished and not balanced properly, they are also more suited for multiplayer environments that feature cooperation and scarcity. It might seems as though the new additions don't mesh well right now in single player worlds and I think that's a combination of both the fact that the balancing isn't so great right now, and that it's also NOT a single player driven update! That's not to say that you can't play or experience these things by yourself, it's just foolish to not see nor understand that some of these systems have been made clearly with multiplayer in mind.

Additionally, I'm not saying EVERYTHING IS PERFECT.
There are things that need to be balanced, changed, made better, etc. Muscle Strain was a great example of this. I think in it's first iteration, it was too oppressive, and too hard to avoid. Now that it got reduced, it feels a lot more manageable, but there's clearly balancing that TIS wants to do (which should also go without saying for the rest of the new systems)