There is no direction to go, it’s a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don’t like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you’re worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. “Survival” is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it’s not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they’re not the core of the game.

If you want a more “guided” experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game’s different systems.