Initial progression Feedback

[Skifree]

While this feedback may not be applicable to all users, I've found the initial progression as a solo player to be excruciatingly slow.  I chose a tile on a mountain (550 altitude), and as far as I can tell there are no veins that I can detect above or below ground yet.  This means I have to mine rocks, which sucks but it's not the end of the world. I shouldn't have to hollow out a mountain randomly to find Iron.

 

Factorio is one of my all time favorites.  It's very similar and it's mastered the long slope of progression in a way that even the daunting ceiling is fun to work towards.  You build a bus of ore > ingots > composites and then you add to it all the sub components needed.  It lets you focus on resource identification and always optimizing and redesigning - always feeling like progress is being made.

 

In DU, the same feeling is not captured.  Initial experience is a harsh grind, not because of quantity of things to make - but the inability to establish unoptimized systems early on. Moving away from a bottleneck (nanocrafter) is important.  Some reasons why this experience occurs.

 

1. Impossibly to produce in parallel.  There should be XS versions of all assemblers and refineries.  Without these, we can't even begin a multi-threaded factory. Assembler M requires too much production and establishing even 4 refineries for the basic ores takes much too long.
2. There's no small factory to produce screws,pipes,etc.  I would expect there to be at least an assembler XS for these.  Players will need a surplus of these.
3. Industry units as prerequisites are time sinks.  They don't do anything except gate the machines that produce.
4. The only refinery is M and the path is too long.  This early into the game, I shouldn't be weighing the path of spending 400K on overpriced refineries in Sanctuary to establish a production line.
5. Inventory management is a pain, because all production stops in order to make containers of a notable size.
6. Why again are core units size restrictions a thing?  Shouldn't scale be limited by resources and not artificial bounds?
7. Beginning static unit is XS but first assembler is M.  Assembler M completely out-scopes to size of unit XS volume.  Beginners shouldn't be building dense cubes of components to eek out production.  Adding more XS cores would help to not feel confined, but for some reason there's a limit of 1.  
8. Core upgrades are non-existant.  I shouldn't have to repackage an entire factory to upgrade.
9. Action items shouldn't take up inventory.  These should be moved or hotbar adjusted.  
10. Sort inventory by type or volume would be helpful

 

Hopefully stuff like this will improve, as new players might look at this and skip the game, assuming the later game is much more grindy.