-Downloaded this not realizing how early in development it is, possibly consider adding "Unfinished" or "Not ready for general play" until it's out of prototype phase. I like the direction of the mod and I'm familiar with game testing so I understand the process, but I probably won't be the only one expecting more.
-Landed on planet, explored around, dropped the landing pad and made a small base. Messed around with the harvesters for a bit, intentionally waited around to spawn a worm. Realized I was stuck unless I shipped in a rocket silo, so I opened up the editor to escape the planet.
-Minor Bug: When the spice harvesters are facing upward their steel box is inaccessible as it's collision box is covered by the harvester
-Minor Bug: The spice tooltip says it has a rocket capacity of 10,000; however, only 2000 is shipped on each transport due to the 20 block limit on rock silos and the spice 100 stack size. The automation of rockets is not affected by this bug.
-Minor Bug: Placing a harvester by hand results in the steel chest spawning. Having a robot place the harvester fails to spawn the chest.
-Overview suggestions: I can see that the core mechanic of the mod is to harvest spice as quickly as possible before the worm arrives and then leave before your harvest is destroyed. True to the book/movie. The first issue I see with this is the barren nature of the planet. Without on planet resources everything would need to be shipped in from another planet, and there's very little asteroid clutter making parking a ship in orbit to generate basic resources unreliable/slow. Add to that the long distance (double the norm for base game routes) means a lot of waiting on resources. There does need to be some way to get materials on planet:
Coal, Iron, Copper, and Stone all make sense, even if it's not cannon to the setting. Routing all of those materials on a fulgora template world (A number of other mod planets use the fulgora algorithm with altered tiles) is actually an interesting concept, and i see both types of Arrakis sand can be built on by Rail Supports.
Without access to water you're forced to rely on solar power. Coupled with long nights and suffering blackouts can be expected. There needs to be a way to generate power without water. I had been considering a building or multi step process that converted spice to energy, but I think the core concept of the mod is gathering up as much spice as possible and shipping it off world. Alternatively, wind turbines would work, there are many mods with them already, and they make sense for the setting.
The mechanic of gathering spice requires 100% of the players attention with no indicators. Every aspect of Factorio is designed to be automated to the point you can completely walk away from the computer without worry. Spice gathering does not allow this. The 'Enemy Expansion Notification" mod spawns an alert whenever enemies create a new base. It should be possible to create an alert whenever the sandworm spawns. I would recommend a custom alert noise. This would alleviate the initial setup of the planet, but eventually the system would need to be 100% automated as the player might not even be on the planet anymore.
Hope this is a help, I can see a lot of potential with this mod.
