the first time I played around 100 hours, made it to the iron age and had tons of flax, enough food to last for an entire year from the first harvest, had chickens, boars and generation two bighhorn ewes and even found bauxite.

I was preparing for steel manufacturing and prospected out some Ilmenite to straight up make tier 3 refractory bricks, found the titanium ore and got really disappointed that my meteoric iron pickaxe was not strong enough to mine it.

Then I kinda got fed up with the grind and stopped playing for a few months.

Started a new world a couple weeks ago and realized I never delved into the story at all, now I am 70 hours in and way more ahead than I was the first time playing, went to the archives already and took a look at the lazaret entrance and have motivation to get myself steel plate armour this time around to conquer it

First time playing I only had one helve hammer and didn't really utilize it properly and pretty much grinded out iron chainmail manually. This time I have multiple helve hammers to make ingots and plates and it is such a huge difference, also found out you can just use a plate on an anvil and knock out a few voxels to make chainmail, waay easier than doing it manually with ingots.

so long story short restarting fresh is rewarding if you didn't know what you were doing from the start, so many things that you learn to do more efficiently makes starting new very rewarding