Re: busywork
I guess? I mean, here's what I remember from the game (no reign of giants purchased): The first part is pretty decent, you spend a lot of time and effort on survival as is promised so that's cool. There's definitely a balance of resources to maintain, and you gotta get ready for winter.
.... and that's it.
Once you make it through winter, you're done. You don't want to fight giants, leave piggies for that. The hounds come more often in larger numbers so you either must stock food to keep piggy bodyguards, live near a village, or make a trapline. I chose a trapline, so every four days I had to hide behind it, kill off hounds, then spend 2 days resetting the trap line (you can't just reset a trap, you have to pick up and replace each one individually...) then grab food and have about a day to explore... then the hounds attack and you have to replace all your trap line and start all over.
It's the definition of empty, pointless grinding. I'm not even going to see the
Infernal demonrealm beneath the caverns
because there's no way to progress other than starting completely over and trying to rebuild faster... so grind more. Given the general vehement hatred of grinding in OG, I figured I'd point that out in case someone was eying the game expecting something different.
I can't comment about multiplayer though, I played before that was a thing.