This is a phenomenal voxel survival sandbox game. Don't take the fact it looks like Minecraft too hard, it's far better than you might give it credit for.

For one, the game focuses on the survival aspect. You have to knap the parts of the tools you're making before you can put them into a stick. You need to worry about having a balanced nutrition to get more health. You need to rotate crops, smelting and smithing is a multi step process where you have to heat up the nuggets in a crucible in a firepit, pour them into molds that you crafted from clay and then hardened by burying them underground and setting fire around them, then wait for them to cool down before taking them to a forge, fill that with coal, place the parts in, heat them up, then place them on an anvil to then shape with a hammer to make, where you have to shape it all into the proper design while it's hot, then cut off the excess material. Then you have to quench it (throwing it in a pool of water is the easiest way). And the harder metals need much higher temperatures to smelt, meaning you need much better methods to smelt them before they can be smithed.

It's a super complex game that is phenomenally better with friends, and has super deep lore that, in every case I've seen of those playing, has "given that sense of discovery from playing Minecraft for the first time". A good way to look at it is that Vintage Story is a game that proves that Minecraft is a 15 year old game.