I just want to start off saying that I love the concept and general play. It’s certainly the start of something that could play for decades.
That being said, I have been a commercial level developer for 45 years, a program of mine is on the windows 98 disc. Old yes, but I do have a crap load of networking experience and I would like to offer a couple of suggestions to improve network play. From a design aspect you need to decide if you are only ever going to allow teams of two or go bigger. Since your current code base is two, I would suggest you skip the host server and implement peer2peer as it would be far faster, especially off the same router. The biggest performance boost would be by generating a unique ID and on client map download, offer to save the map locally and stuff the ID and map into a memory slot. On future loads send the ID and have the client scan the slots for it first before requesting the entire map again.
From the audience perspective, I would note that many players are not necessarily interested in escaping, but staying and building a nice off grid existence. For my wife and I (both over 60) this is something to do together and the building and exploring is fun, not interested in fighting and escaping. That said, existence is directly tied to the amount of stone in the map generation. Critical path. No stone, no knife, no fiber, no water, no food, death.
I am also guessing the mentioning of buckets and machetes, and axes are not for consoles… these items could fix the stone issue as long as they don’t break.
Just a few suggestions, thanks for reading.
Chuck