I just completed Project Trashdragon and Operation Iron Man after spending a day on Rubia, the start to finish took me around 8 hours. I admit I came to this mod a little unconventionally, adding it to my save after beating Aquilo, Maraxsis and a few others. Thanks to the drop pod limitation until the end I don't think this significantly affected my play experience from coming to the planet earlier.
The Pros:
1) The unique challenge of being forced to build in only one direction for hard materials was a lot of fun. After I realized how to automate ammo production and trash removal, the rest began to click. It felt like I was desperately struggling against the wind with every building orientation while trying to keep as westward as I could with my belts to keep as much turret coverage as possible.
2) I was nervous at first that I couldn't drop my bots like on Cerys, but I was glad to see there were plenty to draw out of scrap heaps on the planet. It's a fun bit of discovery building on the concept of Fulgoran civilization, seeing there were engineers here long ago that abandoned the place and left all the mess around to try to rebuild from.
3) The unique backwards production chains with a combination of spoilable bacteria and unconventional recycler behavior was a fun shake up to my usual circular go-to for recyclers. The bacteria spoilage was feel too challenging since it simply disappears when it expires and it's easy to pipe fluids any direction.
4) I enjoyed the music tracks that were all unique to Rubia, they felt fittingly junk-punk.
5) The bits of found lore while excavating ruins and the surprise of some random events kept things interesting for exploration.
The Cons:
1) I have mixed feelings on the country song - on the one hand I really like your lyrics and kinda dig the sound, but I have ethical hangups with Suno AI. I think I saw you mention elsewhere there's a way to turn it off which I'm grateful for.
2) The humor and naming grew progressively more off-putting to me. It felt like the pleasant achievement of completing the various technical challenges was soured by seeing tech names like Gamer Girl Bathwater be revealed. This pushed me to uninstall the mod after I was done with the Iron man tech but before I expanded the infrastructure with external resources or exported anything besides science. I didn't like knowing the meme-y titles were sitting in the tech tree, and broke my verisimilitude a little too hard.
All in all this was a really impressive mod from conceit to execution and I want to thank you for making and sharing it.
