I enjoy starting with no clearing, but the lowest you can drag the slider is down to 17% (as far as I know you cannot manually enter a value), and if you disable the clearings itself it effectively is set to 100% instead of 0%. I would like disabling this option to remove the clearing.

This is intentional - I have an intent to link the clearings slider to clearings around other resources and the like as a future feature. However, I can decouple the starting clearing and give it its own slider, if that would be preferred.