No, the core gameplay is the same, it's incredibly shallow, even by survival standards. I understand some people love busy work, but let's not pretend they did something incredible. They barely fulfilled their original promises (multi-player). Murray still needs to apologize publicly for his lies on TV though.
Biggest disappointment in gaming I ever had.
Recently played it again. Has it more content? Sure. Has it multiplayer? Well.. I guess you can see each other, but it's a terrible experience in so many ways. Has it most of the features promised to be in the game even before it launched? Not.. even.. close. It might be an "okay" or for some people even "good" game, but compared to what has been promised, it would still deserve the steam rating of "mostly negative"
It was pretty cool for the first 4 hours, but got repetitive fairly quickly.
Caveat: I'm not really into the big open survival games anyway; Subnautica was alright, but Fallout 4 and Rust (the game) put me to sleep.
I'm still waiting for something on par with Freespace or the old Playstation classic Colony Wars (1 & 2).