Check it: you play a Confed military engineer, dispatched in a shuttle to go respond to a request for service at a sensor/defense autonomous station. You get there and your shuttle gets hit by something and can’t sub-dive out. But! The station has oxygen, food, water, heat, etc, as well as a small 3D printer (upgradable, of course) and you can use your standard issue multitool as a fusion cutter to chop some materials from a few near by asteroids
Eventually, you’ll make or find a gun, you’ll be able to repair a wrecked fighter in the asteroid field and turn it into a mining ship, and the big goal is fix the shuttle and get home. Or maybe if you want some horror element, there’s a Grey somewhere that you have to avoid
Or, if we wanted more of a trial to overcome than just "survive and fix the shuttle", could always throw some "ancient tech from a dead race" in there, too.
Inspirations:
In as much as this is a crafting survival game, the term "campaign" is not the most accurate descriptor, but we're using it as an easy short hand for the story beats of the game, which are primarily delivered in two ways: