I know the concept of this game is that "community of players create the world"

But this just feels like fallout 76, a baron land where you have nobody and nothing to interact with.

This could be changed by adding some npcs, this would add additional life to the server and a support structure for new players.

I think a good location for them would be founders isle, instead of the buildings being "examples" of things, you could turn it into a active newbie city where new players could hang out and learn the game before heading out to settle their own tribe.

This way you could turn buildings into different shop spaces, founders isle would feel more like a city instead of an abandon debug example room. The buildings would have a reason to exist...

Like the game seems so dead and aimless to new players (like fallout 76) that there really needs to be a reason, like quests, to keep them powering through the rough starting grind.

Some NPC shop ideas to give newbie 25q items or money rewards or trades:

bar/pub NPC/shop ~ could have the NPC give you a starting quest with the reward being a water sac so you have mobile water, than offer to fill it once you have one.

dock/fishing NPC/shop ~ could have the NPC give you some starting quests; catch x amount of fish to trade for a fishing rod, maybe he'll trade you something for fish, possibly cash?

toolcrafter npc/shop ~ could have a npc give you some starting quests for some basic tools, taking you through each tool to progress to the next required, could possibly give materials required for next tool quest or cash reward.

weaponcrafter npc/shop ~ could have a npc give you starting quests to craft different weapon types, could have the rewards be materials for the next quest or money.

Honestly could have one for every crafting type, have them do some basic fetch quest or craft quest for some basic reward or money.

You could take this a step farther and have it so that when you hit say 50 or 75 or 100 craft that it will unlock another more complex craft as possibly a weekly quest that would require more effort. If you did this than you would continuously have something for people to do, kind of like how "guild wars" has "nicholas the traveler" for people who have completed everything in the game, there is still quests for them to do if they wish to seek out "nicholas the traveler" they can bring him items and than he exchanges them for something good.. this means that people who "already have their build completed" still farm these, it gives everybody from new to old something to do that changes every week... this means every week everybody would have a reason to log in and continue to play.

I really think having some sort of "nicholas the traveler" NPC walking around founders isle would be really good to have, weekly quests would be amazing even if its a rotating set of quests that are the same it would give people something to do and look forward to each week to get their rewards.

Cuz atm there is no rewards in this game, no npcs, no system to pat someone on the back when they do something right or to encourage them to continue playing by giving them something they want in exchange for a quest or action of some kind.

By not having any NPC's in this game AND having such low player base, this game is going to be plagued by the same problems as fallout 76.

So really the only two options I see here to grow player base is to add a reason for them to play OR add more players for them to play with.

You need NPC's OR you need F2P (even if they are limited), or both, cuz you can't build a community of players with the current player base, so you either need to add more player base in huge numbers (only way to do that is f2p) OR you need to make up for the fact there isn't players by adding NPC's.