Palia is now in closed beta on PC. Singularity 6 has a new trailer, and a getting started guide for new Palians, citing some highlights on how you might want to spend your time in the cozy MMO sim.
Several of the developers name the things they enjoy the most. Director of Publishing ziE says to keep an eye on insect catching, which could be fun to work on with someone else, catching the buzzing insects that can get a little chaotic. Others name things like hunting, and other resource gathering activities, some put a spin on them. One says that, being a min-maxer, plotting out a carefully efficient garden has been the most fun.
These possibilities and more were laid out in the recent Dev stream presenting Palia’s gameplay options. Something else that's notable, judging from some of the developer comments, is the writing and story that you'll be able to experience, from the playful “amazing puns, dad jokes, & silliness” to the story and getting to know the residents and NPCs. After all, Palia’s dev team has emphasized that you can make friends and get to know every NPC (and romance some of them).
For the closed beta, this will be build 0.165, with the team noting that during this patch cycle in preparation for the game to get its wider access into closed beta, the devs fixed over 540 issues. They've listed several of them, that will give you an idea of how far they've come. Among the bugs fixed, characters are not visually resetting anymore to their default when you changing servers, your tent will not get into a state where it gets stuck and can't be picked up, the starter vines are no longer experiencing significant hitching, server chat and whispers are also now working as intended. and a number of plants are not out there in the world with missing textures.
Since it is still beta, some issues remain, but the welcome guide also includes several of these issues listed, along with how severe they are.