I started a run (now almost at blue science) with no biters. FWIW, I don't have SA so manual spoilage. At first, I got a very very dry map and figured in a matter of minutes that it wouldn't work with the tons of wood necessary and restarted with a forested starting point seed. I should have read the full mod description. But anyway...

I'd love it if someone could play through and give suggestions for balance

Would it be possible to include a custom map generation preset ensuring a suitable starting point near forests, and also warn if that preset is not selected? (For reference, Pyanodons does exactly that.)

Another thing I found is that vanilla intermediates, such as circuits, are completely useless since they just convert to and from their constituent letters one to one. Is it intended that they are even still selectable and visible as recipes?

I never thought about modifying the map generation before, but this is actually a really good idea! I'll add map generation to the list of tweaks I would like to do once my midterm season ends ^w^

As for vanilla intermediates, yes it is intentional that they're kind of useless. I thought it was really funny when I first realized, and I couldn't figure out any way to make them work, so I just left them like that. I'm sure there's probably a use for them in larger-scale modular builds to reduce the amount of on-site letter recycling, but it's not my priority to make them worthwhile given the idea behind this mod.

Ok, thanks for clarifying.

On a side note, someone on the subreddit found an exploit, whence you can decompose partially used science packs into fresh letters and then back into a fresh packs. I guess that damaged/used items should either not be decomposable, or yield decomposed letters. I don't know of either of these is possible in a recipe though.

I couldn't find any way to prevent this method of infinite science other than just not allowing the decompilation of science packs, unfortunately, so that's the fix I ended up implementing.

As for map generation, I looked into it, and ensuring the player always spawns near wood would require some advanced shennanigans that I just do not have the full day of dedicated attention it would require. The main reason I felt trees were important was for their pollution-absorbing capabilities and for pre-oil M's, but having tested it a bit, I think I drastically overestimated how important they were. Out of an abundance of caution, I did increase the fish count a bit on average and toned down some early military tech costs, both of which were causing minor issues even in wooded starts, and which also has the side effect of making desert starts much more viable.

Both of these should be implemented in version 1.2.0. Thanks for the feedback ^w^

Another potential minor enhancement would be to add an optional dependency on Milestones, and add one for each letter and digit maybe.

Yeah! I've been meaning to do that for a while, but it probably won't be for a bit since I am swamped irl right now >w<
It is on my todo list though :3