Maybe this is mostly personal preference, but I don't really like the extended "burner phase" thing (excessive amounts of hand-mining/harvesting, hand-refueling/feeding machines, and everything telegraphed as being obsolete as soon as you unlock electricricity) and feeling like it being so present in so many mods. Whenever I see the phrase 'burner assembly machine' I want to groan out loud. It's like every mod author had the same idea for something that didn't need to be in the base game, and isn't there for a reason. (At least this mod isn't making me craft wooden gears, I guess.)

Here especially, it's feeling like extra padding before I can even get the agricultural tower to do the farming that I'd assumed would be at the core of this mod. A hundred science packs to unlock basic technologies for full automation is 10x too much.

So in addition to the 100 electric circuits you need 500 tungsten bars to make 100 machine research packs for the agricultural towers, which is a lot when you're still trying to bootstrap things up.

the reason i used the groan phase, i wanted solar panels to be the first unlock for electricity, instead of "burner" electricity generators. being a green, plant based planet.

there is also an excessive amount of spoilage at the beginning with the inefficient bar crafting, using it to power everything at the start makes sense.

there is a quirk to the burner agricultural tower, it has enough input slots for all the seeds on foliax.

i see where you are coming from but the entire end game production of bars for this planet is biochamber, which are even worse burner machines (fuel feeding wise)

the irony here is that i built this planet because i dislike space logistics (and love growing plants).

what should i change, in your opinion, to make the beginning less like a day on the real life farm?

I can appreciate building something that you'd want to play, don't get me wrong.

So okay, the mod bills itself as an alternative start, so I go in expecting Nauvis equivalency in some regards. If you picture a playthrough of unmodded nauvis you get all your basic building blocks relatively quickly; you handcraft 10 science packs (which just cost a couple simple ingredients) to unlock automation, couple more for undergrounds and splitters, etc.

Compare and contrast here where you need to put together a relatively complex chain to get electric circuits which are the common ingredient in any science pack, and you also need 100x packs to start doing any research. So I'd start with cutting the research costs to 10-50% of what they are now, if you aren't going to change the electric circuit recipe.

Basic bar recipies taking 1/5th of a stack of the pulp is also an annoyance and clutters up your inventory quickly if you're hand-feeding, and also also makes it take forever to do any sort of inserter-based automation. I'm guessing you can unlock better recipies that take less pulp but you're still stuck with the basic stuff for the first hour(s).

... While I've got your attention, a few little water patches here and there wouldn't be a bad idea. On my playthrough, I started getting everything set up near the middle of the starting area, made some neat rows of trees so I could quickly harvest anything I needed, put down some stone brick pathways, started building my production lines, saw I needed water... and then saw that the only water was several screens away, and copper pipes were goddamn expensive so I couldn't pipe it in, so I had to pack everything up and move over to the edge. It almost made me quit the mod then and there, honestly.

there is a setting for the mod that changes the research cost of only foliax techs, default is 4x.
i play with aai-loaders and they really make it much better with moving the spoilage around at the beginning.
the start area water, i can def add a small spot near player spawn, thats a good suggestion.

i spent all yesterday looking at the start techs and the recipes, trying to find a way to speed up the starting experience without changing the intended flow.

i think ill change:
burner agri tower, remove bar and circuit from recipe, use biomass instead and have it unlock from one of the plant harvesting trigger techs.
add white underground and splitters
change basic bar recipes to 5 bar and 15 spoilage
add small water spot near player spawn
reduce the default research multiplier to 2x

Ah okay, might want to mention the loaders if that's the intended default experience. I also hadn't thought to check the mod settings (I suspect most people don't.)

Will give this another shot.