Maybe I am missing something but I just tried a cold planet start with medium everything except hard start equipment, high food needs also high heat and radioactivity sensitivity. I tried a bunch of times and found it unworkable, because you have no suit and have no insulation and cannot get enough food to stay still and at night this kills the avatar over and over. I dont think the space heater thermal mechanics are working right either. First you have to dodge around watching ambient to get an effect from it and this is worse on a gradient. Sometimes it heats slowly and sometimes rapidly with the same temperature differential so you often have to wait a long time to warm up while starving. Also different temperature differentials have inconsistent effects, if you get the ambient at 17 you can heat the avatar up to 25 but if you only get 11 ambient your avatar is stuck at 11 too when you would expect it to be able to make about 19. So you take damage while looking for food and get an injury and then death is expected. I gave up with this and set retain inventory due to the avatar dying half a dozen times in the first night. I found a hot spring but could not stay there without starving andcould not dive to get weed without taking damage due to no suit. Iron is too sparse to make a suit so you have to find wrecks to make a suit but you dont have time because no food in the wrecks and most wrecks are too cold at night. IMHO its imba and not a feasible start environment on high food & heat settings. I think thermal heating needs to more consistent and the lowlands need some food in so you can hide out in a warmer place overnight, which you just cannot do on high food requirement setting as it stands.
Try standard (servers and scenarios can have tweaked settings and starts) Survival Snow starter with seed 3632170 Large, medium difficulty and hard inventory. I went South-East towards water, had a starter HV up by the end of day 2, also took down 3 drones during that time, with shotgun. Pistol with ammo I dumped in Blueprint Factory. No issue finding food and materials. Seeds give different starts, along planet size. Some can be too difficult for even experienced players and high difficulty, but doable on medium or low. Sometimes it can be up to luck what direction you move and find needed stuff. Consider the settings and/or seed used are above your competence (of a start), before wishing changes to game balance. Consider to use the same seed for next try, to see if it helps to know the placement of resources. Reducing the "luck" path. Cold planet: You might need to get to a "green" area that have enough starter resources (food and heat drinks). You need to get a portable constructor (3 iron ore) ASAP, so can turn stone into starter ores. Use the F5 drone as much as possible while close to a heater. Sleep at night, stuff respawn so have a gather route in the morning. Get a shotgun and a sniper, pistol and rifle is not needed then, better use of copper early on. If find Wreck POIs, then collapse them to get steel plates, can then skip mining iron early on. Also used for gatling ammo, the cheapest there is, save copper early on. Have as cheap as possible starter HV with cockpit as BP to be spawned when level 5 is reached. Then do not need to research the equipment. Preferable designed to be easily upgraded while get more resources and XP. Most critters are doable with the survival tool, I use 3 of them since free, one for each setting since faster to swap between them than changing the function setting (I also have them in common slots and to be replaced when get multitool and drill and weapons). After fast setting a direction for the escape pod, I start crafting along placing stuff on toolbelt.
Thanks for the suggestions which all make sense. The triplicate starter gun is an interesting idea and the drone I will have to experiment with. Forgot about the tent as I always played the desert planet before where night is the best time to forage and you would rather sleep in the day. I think my hard experience (single player) was a particularly bad seed tbh with no iron boulders and no food. I was also out of practice and not experienced with the cold world start. I restarted with normal settings and a different seed and its perfectly doable on normal, with loads of iron and a foresty patch with quite a few food plants. Have set up a minibase with armor locker and got a light suit with food to spare by day 3. I tried the hard game again and was doing OK using the drone but was killed by a bug where the heater disappeared when I plunked it down leading to death by frostbite in the time it took to make a new one. Nasty bug in those circumstances I feel.
OK here is a screenshot of one of the problems I am talking about, the avatar is standing right next to the heater on level ground and its not adding any heat effect. If you look its -22 and ambient is also -22. So how is he going to heat up? There is no point using up hot bud drinks because its bugged so its just a waste, you just cant beat the bugs. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2684909978 To add context to this, it was approaching midnight so getting very cold and the heater calcs seem to go haywire everywhere you put it down at this time which suggests something funky in the code for night effects. Also I skirted all around the heater in the screeny and up close and far away and there was no location where it was having any effect. The terrain is flat as a pancake and it makes one wonder if the heater is somehow not in contact with it but it was doing similar on lumpy terrain and it got increasingly difficult to find a location where there was any effect and as I say above, the effect was not pro rata, at 15 you can get warmed to 25 and at 14 you cant warm higher than 14 which seems a bit punitive and arbitrary if by design but it is probably another bug.
YW. Could be a bug, yes. You need to stand very close to the "heater", within 1 "large block". It only improve the temperature max 10 degrees C (colder or hotter), not as the old version that gave you +25 degrees C regardless. Also you can not stand on any structure, like placed it just outside a POI and stand on a block. Extra tip: Is possible to have a BP of a level 1 HV (or build) that need no experience to unlock, consisting of: Core, cockpit, generator, fuel tank, O2 tank.
I am replaying the snow start on a new seed to see what I have learned and offer feedback. One thing I want to say is I dont like the way the game is apparently cheating to create crisis. It cheats by sending a drone after you in the middle of producing waves of adverse cold weather which you cannot survive without a suit and EVA module. You dont start with even a suit in the cold start with hard inventory. This combination of cold spells and drones coming out of nowhere to hunt my avatar keeps happening and is very pointed so I dont think it is a coincidence. The super cold challenge is like radioactivity storms on the desert start. OK challenge accepted, you need a place of shelter, powered sealed base or cockpit or lowest tech, tent to sleep it out without taking a hit. Fine, what I object to is combining the cold spells with drone attacks especially when I disabled base drone attacks (I have no base but it is still coming after me when I cleared the area) and the drone does not obey the laws of time and go away when sleeping/hiding in the camo tent for 8 hours. By pointed I mean I just had 10 straight 8 hour naps and at the end of each one it was either a cold spell or heavy snow (when medium snow lifts in two or three naps) which seemed excessively unlucky, while a drone advanced towards me, remaining in place during each nap, like some strange parody of Dr Who's weeping angels, when it should have gone away while I was in the tent for 8 hours. If plants grow and the world turns then the drone should go about its business. It remained frozen in place each nap and the cold spell did not lift while it advanced to fire on my avatar. It annoys me that the game cheats like this. I dont like it, it is not self consistent, I should be able to hide the avatar from the drone in my camo tent if I choose to and if as I suspect its a cheaty crisis scenario then I dont think drone behaviour and weather should be linked like that. I am now also convinced the heater mechanic is flawed and needs to be improved, to work by proximity via vector not terrain and needs to be more forgiving than it is as its a PITA to shuffle around and wait a tick each time to see if it is working. Another thing about the heater is I really dont appreciate the 14° cut off for raising body temperature. It is not credible. At 15° ambient (environment plus heater) you get full heating to 25° but at 14° you get nothing. It should not be like that, at 14° you should get 23°, at 13°> 21°, 12°> 19°, 11°>17° etc i.e. lose two degrees body temp maximum for every one degree ambient lost, not suddenly be unable to heat up at all. EDIT oh and btw the bug where the heater disappears when you put it down... happened again and is a catastrophic showstopper bug when temp sensitivity is set to high. When you combine this kind of heater clunkiness with cheaty drones it feels like you are fighting the interface and engine.
The tier-3 factory built light HV idea is a good one, thanks both and that is how I played the second start which I based my last feedback post on and survived the environment and drones without dying at all, unlike the first snow start playthrough, until the Karot cruiser one shot sniped me from 300m, though that was my carelessness as I was trying to build a gun battery which would kill it. Will have to strategise for the threat and burrow down and use the drone to build next time. With the HV I was able to get my epic drill from the Pol Sanctuary as an explorer reward quite quickly, which makes burrowing strats a lot easier. Though that HV was only available because I saved a design from the first playthrough which I had to make by hand first time after I had a base because all my previous designs were wiped after the version changes as I have not played for a while. I will share below. "SnowBoard" is minimal utilitarian, lightest tier zero cockpit, with RCS, fridge, wireless, detector and two 250 size cargos with a green HV pad in each corner. A quad light HV utility flatbed, 3x9x2 and cheap at 44Cu 39Si 18Fe 17Csub. SnowBoard Screenshot https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2714339116 SnowBoard workshop https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2714335697
