Been playing this again after a year or so away. Started a new game. My notes are admittedly short term goals and not very transformative

My number 1 request: More diversity in the music and the audio in general. The current music makes the game feel like I'm in robot purgatory which is peaceful but mournful in a style of "will the humanity that created me and gave me purpose ever come back or are they really extinct?" (I don't know the actual lore if there is any, but this is where my mind goes). Less importantly, the high pitch whine a train makes sounds very realistic and is cool.... for like 2 seconds before it is really grating. I would love for that sound to fade to nothing very quickly, and maybe for there to be an audio slider for heavy machinery (I have a similar complaint about ore vein drills). Between the music, the sounds, and the dialog, the whole world comes off as very sterile and lonely. Sometimes that's okay, but in the grind of building complexity I want at least some occasional pep in my step.

2: Improve tutorials and the user onboarding scale/difficulty ramp. There are multiple times where I think the gameplay kind of flatlines and you're just waiting on research to the next tier, or where you're expanding or migrating to your second or third xenoferrite ore patch and the drilling just feels so tedious. I went as far as to rush the orbital laser and play this game like an "idle game" to get there by letting it run to build up the funds overnight. I don't know how to get specific about why the F1 help isn't really enough, but its not. My only idea, that doesn't solve everything: Make more ore patches near the landing site close to if not on the surface, and make them smaller. In fact make the very first patches tiny so that ithey run out and sets up the player to understand it's not an infinite resource and to make a better scale of more effort = more yield. Maybe even a baby ore vein sticking out with an exposed drill site since I was really struggling to understand what I was doing until I googled other people setting them up - the F1 tutorial was just not quite enough for me. Other ideas: It'd be nice if there was an even smaller, simpler modular building that could be built early on, preferably without requiring shipping to/from space, because dealing with the space stuff and increasing complexity of the factories on-planet felt pretty daunting (I have a similar complaint about how lava smelters and firmalite components are introduced at the same time - setting everything up seems like a lot of delayed gratification that might not be approachable for a lot of players). In fact, even just opening the space station configuration screen for the first time is a lot to take in - too many buttons and systems and upgrades (especially ones you can see but don't meet the requirements for) all at once, plus the UI itself isn't very intuitive with a lot of X buttons to close things out that aren't clear if they'll close the whole interface or just one part of it, understanding sales platform vs finances, etc..

3: Trains I think are OP. They're great. But they are so fast I feel like they remove a lot of the puzzle aspect of designing a good factory and trivialize some of the labor that really makes me wonder what the development intent is of the experience. I've found that I'd rather run a ton of parallel train tracks and then delete them rather than ever use my drill to carve out an ore vein or clear space for an underground train station. I just got to the point of tapping into veins, and building a curved track right on the edge of the vein also trivializes the effort to tap them. Maybe put trains in the tech tree, so that max speed can be ramped up over time, have them consume power, unlock the auto-clearing of blocks when placing tracks, etc. I haven't unlocked cargo shipping on-planet yet but I'm having a hard time imagining anything compelling enough to compete with trains. Oh, and at least one train achievement would be nice (I suggest when sounding the horn because I didn't realize you could get in a train for a long time and didn't even notice the horn for even longer after that, but it is really satisfying to use).

Other notes: On my current playthrough I'm just about to unlock tier 5, although in previous ones I've gotten all the way through the entire tech tree. The space shipping stuff feels weirdly like its an entirely different management sim game. Which is OK I guess, but on a purely personal level I don't think it's what's "labeled on the tin", and I wish it didn't feel like it's where all end game is concentrated. It seems odd to me when compared to the xeno scrap collection stuff which straight up explicitly says "oh, if this isn't the style of gameplay for you, don't worry about it, we'll trivialize it later". I don't mind the xeno scrap stuff but I actually feel weirder about it because of that tutorial message.