I played TON up to a little ways before purple science, then got pulled away by other things. Now I am giving it another go. In my previous run, I never found any iron ore, even when venturing a decent ways outside the starting area. I am surprised to find an iron ore patch just barely outside the starting area now. Is iron ore supposed to be available or not?

To be clear, I don't actually think making iron ore available is "wrong". Once you start making motors, nickel ingots are somewhat more scarce than iron ingots, even if you are only getting iron out of nickel ore. I am just curious about what the intention is.

I think I answered my own question by poking around in the code a little. data/fixes appears to set up the autoplace, disabling iron from the starting area but not disabling it altogether. Still, I'd be interested in a dev answer to this question.

I would also be interested to know your suggestion for mapgen settings.

I'm glad that you are enjoying this mod.

There's a story for the nickel and iron ore in this mod. The android relies on nickel at the beginning because it is easy to extract. After a certain technology level, the android substitutes aluminum for nickel, so the factory needs much less of it. To produce iron without unwanted nickel byproducts, the android starts mining iron ore. Iron ore is more abundant across the planet, and it was just luck that the landing site had nickel.

I prefer to set all resource frequencies to 50% so that there is more empty space and I don't have to build on top of ore.