After you fixed the turret spawn I just wanted to share my experience using the recommended "death world" settings (no water between hexes, starter turrets enabled as well as cranking biter spawner occurence to 600%) so far.

The beginning is horrendous, you're basically just rushing grenades before the turrets run out of piercing ammo (I appreciate you making them epic quality btw). Because ore is mixed you can effectively never gain net positive iron after subtracting iron spent on killing biters with yellow ammo. I had to handmine close to a thousand ore to avoid producing pollution via mining and stretch the red ammo until green science. There was a nearby trade giving yellow ammo in exchange for hazard concrete but I felt like that would have been cheating as it spawns everywhere on the ground.

Researching grenades give you some room to breathe, you can now wall yourself in and mine the shit out of the starter hex's ore to sift for iron, lobbing grenades at any biter hordes that attack. Armed with a shotgun and some fish - bought for amounts of copper wire that would make any grown Romanian cry - you can take out your first nests to discover more trades and finish some quests, the only time you get to interact with the mod 5 hours in. The modular armor and bots are very nice I will admit, though if I had to make a suggestion I'd appreciate if the quest gave 2 roboports and 20 bots, 10 are too little and move too slowly to be of much use besides building a proper furnace stack. Or hell, maybe an energy shield to make clearing nests at this stage in the game easier. My next ambition was unlocking flamethrowers to reduce time spent running around repairing walls and grenading biters.

With flamers unlocked also comes a new way of killing nests: Flamethrower crawl, also known as the KFC deep fryer strat. Expanding my base (that had run out of iron ore at this point) a bit this way I found a trade giving iron ore from copper ore, a couple of iron plates, and explosives. Finally, a coal sink. Also a trade for coins from just plastic, which I promptly started producing as well. Currently, sci wise I just unlocked laser turrets and am working towards researching construction bots so I don't have to repair my walls and turrets by hand, maybe then I can try taking on a dungeon or two before aiming for a rocket silo next.

Even with all my gripes about the early game I like it so fair, it's pogging to find a good trade somewhere and automate the trading process. I'd like to see more unique buffs added to items in the catalog, and maybe redo some useless ones. Perhaps instead of a 5% hand mining speed buff from enhancing ore you could make mining drills work faster/gain productivity? Same for assemblers and crafting speed upgrades. My last suggestion would be increasing the iron ore to copper ore ratio in the starter hex, at least on hard mode. By the time my starter patch ran dry I had around 10 iron chests worth of copper ore sitting around, as I didn't get a decent copper sink trade in my immediate vicinity.

I appreciate you taking the time to try out the death world settings and writing this detailed review. I never tested to see if winning was possible even on a good seed. The options kind of only existed because I thought it would be a crazy difficult challenge if the biters were unrestricted.

Making the quest give two personal roboports instead of one is something I can do. Not sure if the solar charging would be fast enough to keep up with frequent use if using two roboports, but if it is, I'll make that improvement to the quest reward. An energy shield might be a bit much, though.

1.5.0 will bring a revamped random trade generator that will limit the counts of each item in trades, so that'll help with the copper cables being stupidly high (for example).

I will definitely also be adding more item buffs. Giving every item a buff is my intention. It just takes time to come up with things that aren't pointless (like manual mining speed) but aren't overpowered and scale well.

I agree that copper ore is a bit too abundant. I'll be lowering its relative frequency, which will increase all others equally.

I messed up the formatting.

I appreciate you taking the time to try out the death world settings and writing this detailed review. I never tested to see if winning was possible even on a good seed.

I do fully believe it's possible, you just have to get off the planet before hitting 50%+ evolution, which I am close to accomplishing as I do not wish to find out how my rudimentary defenses will fare against big biters.

Not sure if the solar charging would be fast enough to keep up with frequent use if using two roboports, but if it is, I'll make that improvement to the quest reward. An energy shield might be a bit much, though.

Even if it's not fast enough, personally I'd much prefer occasionally using 20 bots (with greater range) than constantly waiting for 10. Not to mention that I had some bots die to worms before unlocking the ability to make replacements. Fair take on the energy shield, I concede.

1.5.0 will bring a revamped random trade generator that will limit the counts of each item in trades, so that'll help with the copper cables being stupidly high (for example).

I'm looking forward to it and will probably start a new save for that then.

I will definitely also be adding more item buffs. Giving every item a buff is my intention. It just takes time to come up with things that aren't pointless (like manual mining speed) but aren't overpowered and scale well.

I appreciate you already thinking about stuff like this and continously improving the mod, but don't feel pressured to work on these things sooner rather than later, like I mentioned in my review I already enjoy the mod as it is and I'd hate to see another modder burn out.

I agree that copper ore is a bit too abundant. I'll be lowering its relative frequency, which will increase all others equally.

Much appreciated.

I just got busy for the holidays. I should be able to get 1.5.0 out within the next couple weeks when I return home. :)