Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
Tried the new game with default settings (no mod) and it kept coming up with awkward maps where I could only find one or at most two of coal, iron and copper. Even after walking in random directions until coming to monsters I could only find them. I don't see how you can start without at least iron and copper (coal you could avoid at first by chopping trees). Then tried with the RSO mod mentioned above and it gave me a starting point with an absolutely enormous amount of everything.
RSO guarantees one of each resource in the starting area. I thought that was default behavior too, but I guess not. The patches do tend to be a bit big; in my first game with a rocket launch I only needed to expand to one each of iron and copper fields, and two new oil fields to get what I needed. My current game is generated with small patches & many aliens, to make expansion both more necessary and harder.

Have some images from this game:

Full expansion:




Local View:




Right now, my expansion is throttled a bit by the ore. I wanted to move the railstations near my base up a ways to make room for multiple stations of each kind, and so I can run at least two tracks in each direction.

Lab complex:



I wound up moving the labs three times.

Full Map:




I completely lost track of actually launching the rocket in this game. I think I might just give it up anyways and try one of the more expansive mod sets like Bob's Mod + Dytech.