I only play in single player and tend to focus on the building and infrastructure side of things. With that in mind, the following is a list of things that keep bothering me, plus some ideas for solutions. Why does the suit constructor need carbon to build the emergency constructor? This only serves to limit the player's ability to start rebuilding to places that have raw carbon. Once you actually have the constructor you can turn stone into carbon, why add the extra step that can prevent the initial setup? In that vein, could placing the emergency constructor on asteroids/other structures be made to work for space starts? Placing them on structures could be balanced by stopping them being placed within a certain radius of each other. Weapons kits: why? It negates the point of crafting your own gear when making it essentially means buying or looting the item you want, but with some extra steps. Especially since nearby vendors are often selling what you're trying to make anyway. For the sake of immersion, upgrades and high tech weapons should come from high end materials you scavenge or build, not dedicated kits. Want a good laser rifle? Salvage some high temperature superconductors from a wreck, steal them, trade for them, build a big, expensive factory that draws raids, etc. Lower tech stuff like miniguns and flamethrowers are 20th century technology. You shouldn't need special kits to build them. If you want to balance them against more advanced gear, make them deployable, like the emergency constructor, or the hoverbike, or those turrets that used to be in a really old version of the game. Put a minigun down and you can blast away for as long as you have ammo, but you can't move around until you exit control of it and carry it somewhere else. The chemical propellant weapon part of the tech tree should be easy to make as an entry level gun for every role and not require any special resources beyond carbon, iron, copper, silicon, and plant fiber. Not good guns, but enough to get by until you can get something 'modern'. Give us the ability to build nightvision goggles. Growth plots shouldn't need an entire block beneath the actual plant unless you're growing a tree (which we should also be able to do, planks are required for a few things, after all). A single, thin wall shaped block on the floor that you place the seeds inside of and provides its own lighting would be easier to fit into builds and look more like modern hydroponics. An automatic harvest option for more advanced blocks would be nice too. Staying on top of your food supply is an important survival mechanics in the early game. Once you're flying around in a spaceship that part should really be automated. A way to farm eggs and maybe alien bodyparts for medicine would be nice. Something for the later game, but it should be an option. The factory. Much has been said about this, but what is basically a cheat system shouldn't be a core part of the game. A copy of the repair pad that spawns a ship after a certain amount of time instead of repairing an existing one would be a massive improvement. It should require finished blocks rather than raw materials (and tell you which ones). That way you can build a ship out of salvaged components even if you haven't unlocked them yet. A way to more readily acquire small amounts of higher end ores would be convenient. There are numerous times I've been half a dozen ingots short of something, so a way to turn the thousands of bits of crushed rock I have into a few titanium/zascosium/promethium ore would be nice. Even if it's literally a thousand to one, it would save me a 15 minute trip to the metal planet to empty the miners I already just checked on. If you want to encourage exploration, why not have the block schematics be something you have to go out and discover in wrecks and ruins, instead of unlocking the techtree with XP? If being able to build nearly all your own gear makes things too easy, limit more advanced parts to being built by specialised constructors. That requires big, resource intensive factories that need to be supplied and defended. Something you could even involve NPCs in. Hire them to supply or defend your base.
