Ammo is important to defend yourself against drones and other monsters.
Because there is no magnesium on earth, it is VERY difficult for new players to defend themselves for a sustained amount of time. This makes them feel helpless and convinces them to quit the game entirely.
Yes, building an SV is helpful and gets them to the moon that has magnesium. Yes, the tutorial should be ignored about building a base and instead that iron should be spend on an SV. No, those comments don’t help newbies that are now without any ammo, and then die because of the lack of ammo. Telling a newbie to ignore the tutorial is difficult because we don’t even know they’re a newbie because they don’t talk or read chat.
It should be an easy fix. I realize we like to try new things that might make for better game play, but I think this shortcoming really hurts when I send new players to join our server.
You can use the pistol to shoot down a few drones but I agree this is not newbie friendly. Going to the moon is easy but for a newbie this not easy.
However, a few hours after the wipe most drones and POI’s are destroyed by players that survived the wipe through OCD or through players that broke the noob-rule and returned to there (happens a lot).
I would caution against giving a standard resource pack to new players. The resource packs as they currently exist give refined materials. Part of the newbie process is to get a fundamental understanding of the game mechanics. Giving ingots would strip them of the opportunity to learn the following two things:
Ore to ingot ratio and craft time
Advanced constructor behavior vs survival/small/large constructors
If the issue truly is resource scarcity then the resources should be given to the new players in the form that they would extract them from the ground. Otherwise you are providing a partial tutorial that will only hamper understanding of core concepts.
My intention that every starter planet except Kelt has no Magnesium is to keep it a friendly space. I mean it is easy and IF they coming just after a fresh wipe and their only enemies are the drones then the pistol + 250 ammo + 50 magnesium is enough to settle down.
Also with rule 2.2 in mind it is a combination in mind. So noobs can’t bash noobs by mining all magnesium and spam them with bullets.
Maybe I add Magnesium also on M32 but for PvE the stats say it is friendly and easy for now?!