I don't know if this is possible but could you make it so you run into some kind of mainland say 150 distance away? Basically like you would start on this island on a world you know nothing about, can only see water in your immediate vicinity, and as you build bigger you run into the risk of connecting to the mainland and facing the biters.

If that is not possible could we get an option for a bigger island? I am playing with other mods too and no offense but the lack of biters (though I love the island) as well as a too tiny of starting space makes it incompatible for a LONG time. The no biters ever kind of bummed me out.

there is a constant i use for the starting circle, you can set that to whatever you want. otherwise the way this works is it deletes everything and places the starting island. the problem with leaving other islands is that i would have to place them manually which means there are some weird artifacts at chunk borders because of the way the generation of normal terrain handles those.

in control.lua there is this line:
local radius=100 -- size of starting circle

change that value if you want a larger starting circle, though you would have to restart with a new map after the change

Some mods need alien artifacts and then you are screwed.

Maybe check with the ResourceSpawnerOverhaul mod on how to interact with map generation better and leave islands with aliens on them every now and then.

Could also work for oil wells. For those you could make the islands small enough and centered in a chunk to avoid problems.