Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Vulcanus is too grindy in rock and ash tree mining before getting the first Foundry so my idea is to reduce the amount of stuff in the starting area, but make them more lucrative so you can faster collect resources from them to make the Foundry instead of mining rocks for a few hours.

What?

Sorry if the TLDR sounds too direct, i have good intentions!
Many people's first few hours on Vulcanus including mine and Michael Hendrick's are without anything brought over, or even if you did bring stuff, it's not what you need. You lost the platform and you now have everything that was on it, stranded there.
I personally skipped military science which was a mistake so I ran out of accessible copper and decided to wing it to Vulcanus with everything that my space platform had and all I could possibly bring with the remaining few rocket launches. This lead to me starting on Vulcanus with a decent amount of stuff that was actually not that helpful because I hadn't looked in more detail at what I should bring - oil refineries, pumpjacks, bots, miners, refined concrete, lube barrels. I still brought solar, belts, assembler 2s, my armor and all that the platform had so that was a massive help, but it was a small space science paltform repurposed for going to Vulcanus.

I think the core of the problem for my experience lies in the time spent hand-mining rocks and trees and smelting steel. If only there was more iron in those rocks so I could do this faster.

Basically the solution would be to make huge and lucrative rocks spawn only around the starting area, replacing the smaller ones and maybe faster hand-mining speed of the rocks and trees. Also changing the ash trees for fewer bigger ones only in the starting area could help. The rest should be like it currently is. This will also improve the experience of building your first few factory pieces without bots as less entities means easier to clean up and the balance doesn't change at all other than making the start take way less time.

Why?

I think this will make the start of Vulcanus way smoother and more fun for inexperienced people and have more positive than negative change for people who repetitively replay the game or know what to bring or don't do cold starts.

The only negative things I could think about are that it incentivizes less people to bring bots since it's easier without them and there's less contrast, less satisfaction from torturing yourself for 3 hours and finally getting that massive boost and immediately feeling the difference between 100 to 20 and 100 to 75 steel plate. And since it took me about 30 minutes to get 3 more Foundries using the first one, that feeling could be very important although it's not my cup of tea when I play a game and it only feels really good the first time.

I used the any-planet start mod, so I didn't even have a chance to start with robots. (1) It's definitely a pain to start your base by cleaning up trees and rocks by hand!

(1) Although it changes the first few steps of the tech tree, so you're not stranded. But I don't think it makes my start much different from you starting and forgetting to bring some items on your rocket.