I'm about five hours in and having a lot of fun, and I watched Neuroplastic's playthrough. I'm playing with biters off, but I keep thinking about what it would take to make biters more possible.

Right now, Magazines require a Z, which is absolutely not going to happen. I think you should change the name to something that uses early game letters. Despite my best thesaurus efforts, the only thing I can come up with is "Bullets", which still uses a U, but it would at least be somewhat more possible.

One further idea would be to then make biters drop Us when they die. That would make playing with biters have an advantage. (Maybe also consider changing Gun Turret to just Turret in that case.)

Thinking about it more, I was never really low on U's. They only come from Burner Letter Decompilers in the beginning, but that's also your source of D's and M's, both of which are in higher demand.

So I think that if you wanted to use "Bullet" for yellow ammo, you could add an early game source of U's without meaningfully changing the game balance and progression for non-biter runs. I'd recommend maybe as a 5-10% drop from decompiling O's? (Please decrease the O->O chance to compensate, though, voiding letters is hard enough already).

When I playtested with biters, I personally never had a problem with biters even up until I tapped out at green science, when I was about to get crude oil running. And at that point, I was about to unlock military science for defender capsules, land mines, and flamethrowers (all of which use letters that would be at my disposal). A big part of the early game in this mod is that it's slow, from my own experience and from those that I've watched, which makes the pollution not as big of an issue early as it is in base game playthroughs when you would be the most vulnerable.

Maybe I was just playing extremely poorly, or didn't get far enough, and if someone does experience problems, this can be something to revisit, but as the mod currently stands, I don't think there is an issue regarding dealing with biters.

Yeah, in hindsight I suspect shotguns would have been adequate until midgame. I just got a little put off by reading "did you know you can melee?," haha

I say go the other way, MAG (or perhaps AMMO). This would mean
- put back the 10 that are in the ship wreckage at the start of the game
- let the player decompile them for early power/assemblers instead of waiting for fish to spoil. (for bonus points add a tips-and-tricks-item about this)
- leave in the possibility of decompiling and recompiling one to reload it, it's cheese but much less impactful than the science version was
- otherwise ammo production is fish-limited like many other things in the early game
- once basic oil is unlocked, trivially producible from PETROLEUM GAS, and PIERCING isn't too bad either