I just finished the game. It was a fun challenge, especially managing byproducts and going through the early game without all the base game's tools. I had a few thoughts during the game that I wanted to share.

The terraforming milestones are underwhelming since the only indication is a UI element appearing or disappearing. I think it would be better with a text message after the first rocket launch and another before the victory screen giving an in-story justification to what is going on.

Although unvoidable fluids are a part of the challenge, you can completely avoid disposal early on by collecting fluids in a few tanks that you manually empty. What about causing area damage when acids are emptied to encourage proper disposal? It would represent the corrosive chemicals being released into the environment.

The boxed recipes for pipe 1 and robot frame 3 don't use the same amount of input per output as the original recipes, which looks like a mistake.

Thanks, I've fixed the recipes in the latest update. I'll think about a message. Your mission was already explained when you first start the game, though it is a lot of time after that before you start working on the final goals.

I don't want to make the early game chemistry unnecessarily harder. The reward for automating it is that your factory can run on its own rather than limp along until something backs up. That part of the game is already a lot for some players to figure out as is.