I really want to like VS but the progression is painfully slow. I love the story, I've put literal hours into chisel art to the point that I got to mod just to make my own doors, and I love the concept of the progression, I just desperately need 4-6 other people so none of us have to do all of the damn work. I quit playing a while back when I'd spent 3 days logging on with the goal of exploring and ended up wasting all my game time doing chores before I could get out and about.

Luanti is a good one too, although it might be closer to a minecraft clone than what you're describing. It's open-source though, and supports a fairly large modding community. There are all sorts of user-created extras that you can download and enable/disable as you please, right in the launcher.

They even have user-created game modes, so you can play the more traditional minecraft-style sandbox/survival game, or do various puzzles/mazes/platformers that people designed.

Like Terrafirmacraft? (Is that still a thing?)

True mining? So you spend weeks looking for rich vains, then chissel them out over months, then process the ore etc. etc.