It seems before choosing start planet you need to use /shout to talk to other people. It would be nice if you didn't have to.

It would also be nice if you could tell the situations on each planet before you had to choose. Asking someone isn't always an option on headless servers. Maybe after you choose the planet you are spawned with very restricted abilities till you confirm that you made the right choice. (Like only being able to use the map and chat.)

The chat thing might be tricky because of how it works when you're a spectator, which is technically the case when you're picking your planet. I'll see if I can come up with something that doesn't suck.

The idea of being able to preview the state of surfaces is great. I might overhaul the entire picking interface and see if it's possible to use the tag preview renderer feature in a different context somehow.

Thanks for the feedback Sir_AL!