The way it is set up as long as you move into newly generated chunks (about 512 blocks in any direction from the spawn point on the pier but safest is 1000 blocks) then updating will not affect anything you build (and we have instructions on how to do full updates in the main post)Just out of curiosity, how far away from town is far enough regarding building a base? Will future updates destroy any base which I build from now on?
As stated earlier, my plan is to keep content updates (major updates) to once a month at earliest and intermediate updates for mod updates/mod bugfixes as often as needed.
There may be a brief period in the first week after a content update that might require more than one major update process depending on the type of bugs found/fixed from the content released but I usually explain what needs to be done if different in those cases.