One of the main ways you progress in the game is by obtaining blueprints and then finding the ingredients to craft them. But you also have to craft things like fuel, ammo, etc. and to repair things. It's fun but can get tedious at times. Luckily the game lets you fine tune the experience at any time (it's actually probably one of the games that does this best imo) and one of the options is free crafting which lets you craft ending immediately without finding the ingredients first. My rule of thumb was to mostly only use it to skip grinding for ingredients I'd found before but needed more of it finding them would be too annoying, but not to skip searching for stuff I hadn't seen yet.

The game is worth it imo. There is lots of content and it goes on sale from time to time. And all the DLC is always free which is nice.