I like it, and would recommend the game, but I'd honestly rather have a new game in the same sort of genre.

I think that it'd be possible to take elements from a variety of games like Terraria, Starbound, Noita, maybe Oxygen Not Included and do something even cooler.

• Noita models at the pixel level rather than the tile level and has a physics engine.

• Starbound has neat atmospheric lighting effects. I'd love to see that, maybe add in fog, godrays, glare, etc.

• Oxygen Not Included lets one build devices. Terraria and Starbound let you build bases, but they can't really do anything.

• If the budget permits, high-res art would be neat. Pixel art lets the brain interpolate a lot, fill in the lack of detail, but if they have the budget to do the higher-res stuff, I'd like it.

• Leveraging the 3d hardware might be nice. IIRC Terraria and definitely Oxygen Not Included use it for zooming, but I don't think much else. Various distortions and other effects would be neat.

• Ditto for multiple threads. Yeah, it's a cost in dev and debugging time, takes some work, but you can get maybe an order of magnitude speedup. CPU single-threaded speeds haven't improved much in about two decades.

• The control is...kind of clunky. I'd love to have something with the feel of, I dunno, Super Metroid or something, one of the successful platformers.

• More music, maybe effects like lighting that pulses in time with music, better dynamic transitions.