Yeah, the painting thing was what I was referring to with the left thumb/right button thing- you can just hold down A and it adds stuff as you move the cursor until you release it, then it starts the build. I can see how using a mouse would be easier and more fluid, but the controller is fine- like I said, it’s not like you are doing it in the middle of combat.
And yeah, I ended up figuring out the systems like ammo, eventually, but since it’s so different from a normal game (press Y to reload, or something) it took a bit. Ditto for energy and materials storage. You build physical structures, so I thought you had to connect them somehow, but no, you can have discrete little self-powering mining operations all over, and they all feed into the same pool, which is cool.
The problem with the Cobalt detector was that it allowed me to research the tech that let me build the detector… which then didn’t show up to be built anywhere, and the game gave me no clue as to why. I had to build the Orbital Scanner for that to trigger. Since so many other techs have building reqs, they should probably add Orbital Scanner to that one to prevent confusion like mine.
I made it to the Desert, I’ll probably go and explore the other biomes before going too far down the quest lines. I do like that it gives you a lot of time, and let’s you kind of go at your own pace, with no big events happening until you hit another milestone.