Given Tiy's desire to keep things "spoiler free", it does look like we'll have to discover most things ourselves. Not that I mind, personally!
That would be kind of awesome tho. If in Hardcore you die, you lose the character and not the world attached to it. Then when you make a new character you can join back the world that you "left" and find back everything how it was, like a base and such but some of it would be destroyed because of the time this "new character" would have taken to discover it. Everything could kind of "aged" if it makes sense. That would be hard to do tho. Only random thoughts.