How painful is this?
Well, it takes about 2-3 hours to get to a small basic power setup, if you focus/rush in that direction.

WHY!?!
Why not?

It has been changing a lot lately, why?
This is a concept that Necrogami and Seyeght have been working on well before 0.17 dropped, we are fine tuning how it plays and making changes as we get further in.

What about biters?
You can try, but with not being able to build anything but miners onto ore we decided to disable biters in our playthroughs.

Do I need all the optional mods?
No, but we highly suggest them.

Map Exchange string of suggested settings:
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Mod Settings:
Startup:
- Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes & Compact Loaders:
- Disable Beltboxes
- Noxys Stacksizemulitplier:
- Stack Size 100
- Merging Chests:
- Mergable Chest: Iron Chest
- MSP - 30 new science packs:
- Levels of Efficiency Research per MSP pack type (requires omnilib): 20
- Difficulty: hardest