Yeah I guess the onboarding also felt somewhat disorienting to me too, it felt like everything was simpler than Factorio but it still didn’t make a lot of sense - power generation for example, like do I really need to collect this much grass?
My advice is to try to forget what you learned in Factorio and be a new Engineer. You know, splitters now divide into 3, it’s a brand new world x)
You can start crafting foundations to build on a grid pretty early on in the game, but as a Factorio player I also tried building straight on the ground in my first save and that was pretty annoying. But then you realize that foundations are pretty cheap and you can just cover a huge area and basically ignore terrain.
To me scaling isn’t strictly harder than in Factorio, it’s just different. Being able to utilize the third dimension and build ad-hoc layers ( or spaghetti :p ) where needed is awesome, I like the additional “modularity”
Oh what a world it would be if people like Wozniak and Swartz weren’t fucked over by their original techbro “friends”