Right now the game isn't much of anything because it hardly has any players. Probably because it doesn't do enough to attract and retain them.
And there are a lot of bugs in the game that interfere even more than the lack of a goal of the game.
That's really not true at all. The developers can, should, and will add plenty of additional elements to the game, including elements that supplant YOLOL programming (like a dedicated in-game map). They pretty much have to, or else the game will stay functionally dead the way it is right now. The existence of YOLOL doesn't prevent Frozenbyte from making Starbase into an actual game.
If this happens, it will be the following:
1. The game will go beyond the basic concept that the players themselves create this world and program it, which will put it on the same shelf with a lot of other projects that StarBase loses in graphics and design.
2. Players (the engineering community, for example Collective), will stop developing something interesting, because there will be doubts about the need to do this, and therefore the game will start losing developer players, but ordinary players need to be supported, so they will have to introduce new mechanics bypassing YOLOL.
3. An increase in the number of alternative mechanics working bypassing YOLOL will lead to the withdrawal of the intellectual community from the game, because the game turns into a banal project like Eve, Elite Dangerous, StarCitezen, but it does not reach the content and its quantity at all
To introduce any mechanics bypassing YOLOL is the death of the project. Everything must be programmed and controlled by the player himself on the basis of YOLOL and the corresponding controlled devices.
Most likely, a device will appear that will be called a map, but you will need to enter information on this map yourself via YOLOL in the coordinates of ISAN or my VECTOR M1.
Which genre are you referring to? Because in each recognizable genre that Starbase overlaps with, I can think of at least one game that predates it and includes an in-game programming language.