If you want to play a star game I recommend Starsector. I’ve been getting back into it recently and it’s great. More a mount and blade in space than a Starfield though. Updates are slow but significant and there’s plenty of game to enjoy already.

One really cool mechanic is story points which you get alongside levelling up (and you keep earning after the level cap) which you can spend in certain parts of the game to do special stuff or break the normal rules which is really cool. Many interesting things tie into it but yeah, lot’s of interesting mechanics.