I'm a bit confused by the purpose of Zone 2. The nerfed Vulcanus seems pointless (calcite has little use at this stage, sulfuric acid is ok), Gleba stuff is all behind space science. Scrap is the only one that seems useful early as it unlocks at blue (or immediately with the option). In contrast, it becomes incredibly hard to find base Nauvis ores because so much terrain is assigned to these biomes that aren't generating much of use.

I ended up re-rolling without zone 2 and it feels much more natural this way.

Not gonna lie, balancing is really difficult and I really appreciate how Wube has done a tremendous job in designing the Space Age DLC.

My original idea of Zone 2 is to provide an easy access of inner planets buildings, primarily foundries, big mining drills, EMPs and biochambers. Mixing in these buildings should provide a better resource longevity even for the starter patches. Technologies might be blocked by space science packs as I have not altered the pack requirements. From my play through, I don't find space science packs to be difficult to get given that the recipe resources are easy to find.

The deliberate nerf to Zone 2 is to somehow balance out what I see as overpowered buildings and technologies. For example:
- Calcite and sulfuric acid into practically infinite clean power -> countered by smaller natural sulfuric acid geysers.
- foundries 50% productivity from molten metal with little calcite -> countered by the limiting amount of tungsten available to only hand mining rocks
- easy Intermediates -> countered by smaller scrap patches

On the other hand, I've also learnt from my play through that easier Gleba environment (only small eggrafts) is actually making it more attractive to work on. (Not gonna lie, I still procrastinate Gleba in my first playthrough and only eventually learnt it):
- only requiring to unlock concrete to get to heating tower + steam turbine provides huge energy boost early.
- Gleba naturally has infinite ores from harvesting and could combine with calcite to provide a decent supplementary stream of resources which further increase the longevity of Nauvis patches.
- Biochamber absorbs pollution and could all in speed modules early on which has almost no downsides.

Nonetheless, I'll have to admit that I also feel that Zone 2 might have to tune down the radius so that Zone 3 kicks in earlier. Not gonna lie, my actual play through definitely does not match exactly how I envision it. I'm sure you also have a similar feeling.

I think one of the core reason is that the map generation has too much impact on the gameplay and more environments also makes it too RNG dependent. For my second play through, I spent way too much time refreshing to get an ideal map to start on.

I am glad that I have made most of the map generation settings customizable and happy for you to find one that best suits your style. Unless game-breaking, I'd rather not make too much changes on map generation and would suggest players to customize their own map instead. If map generation is updated, current saves would have their future generated chunks of the map not aligned.

I hear you. For me the main issue was lack of Iron Ore. In my original setting there were two only non-starter patches, though I did eventually find another further away after revealing the map at radius 1500. There was also no uranium at all in that 1500 radius. I could probably have made it to space with just what was available, they were very dense patches. I did no re-rolling and accepted what was given with default settings, so experience will vary for sure.