You can stumble around and explore everything on your own, the game pushes you forward a bit when you get stronger so there’s not a big chance to get stuck and bored.

But imo it’s fun with wiki open too. Just to look up what weapons i can get for my playstyle and stuff like that. Many things will otherwise take hours to stumble on or you will never know something can be crafted. But you definitely don’t need to read up on everything, I’d use it more to point to cool stuff.

An important point if you want to play with friends is to get into it together or at least have similar gameplay preferences. It’s not as fun when you’re learning to craft wooden armor and a friend drops you a lightsaber cos they already made better weapons.

Nah it’s just that they have blocks of the same size. It probably synchronizes terrain using analogous block types where possible, and player position. Basically it has to convert everything into something similar.