There's quite a lot to do in Empyrion these days. The stuff in the OP is fairly outdated.
The two main draws are 1.) building hover vessels, small vessels, capital vessels, and bases completely from scratch, limited only by your imagination and the potential difficulty of torturing shaped blocks into a grid to fit your vision; and 2.) exploring the now fairly expansive and hand-designed universe (14 now very distinct planets, 7 moons, and the 14 "space playfields" these microplanets inhabit) in search of rare raw material deposits, as well as both friendly and hostile alien Points of Interest (PoIs) offering rare devices and equipment as rewards. There are crashed ships, abandoned facilities, space stations, spaceports, communications centers, trading stations and centers, residential centers, native villages to ethnically cleanse, and many more. Some of the more extensive PoIs are maze-like and full of nasties, and there's a distinct DOOMQuake feeling to clearing them out.
There are fairly sophisticated building tools available, such as symmetry planes and part placement cloning, a full-featured resizable 3D selection box for selecting groups of blocks to be rotated, moved, cut or copied, pasted elsewhere, and a few more useful features.
Just a glance at the Workshop is a good showcase of the cool stuff you can build, provided you have some talent that is.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/383120/workshop/
Actual crafting, survival, and combat aspects have been expanded a fair bit. Most importantly, there are now radiation, temperature, and vacuum hazards, variable gravity that affects your jumping/jetpack physics and fall damage as well as the structural integrity of buildings (you can use fewer pillars to hold up the same platform on a planet with 0.5g compared to one with 0.84g, for example). There are O2 pressurization mechanics for both bases and ships, and plants now require not only grow lights but also ventilation to maintain a certain temperature range in most areas; they can be grown outdoors on appropriate planets, but won't grow at night and can freeze to death. There are three tiers of player armor now, and slots to fit in modules to boost many stats such as armor, O2 tank storage, jetpack usage, general mobility, temperature and radiation resistance, and an EVA module that's all but mandatory for spacewalking. Handheld weapons have been rebalanced so that more than two of them are useful and interesting.
There's also minor player avatar customization now, so of course I made my character look like a sex offender and/or 8th-grade science teacher.
It's most fun with a friend or two. I run my own dedicated server in Europe since I have friends from Ireland, Romania, and who the fuck knows where else.