I've spent an hour and a half in the tutorial because i cant get the polarity machine and the text stays the same no matter what i do idk if its player error or bug but i haven't found any forum or video that explains or shows how it works, is it even useful for the base game?

Did you change the polarity manually?

As someone else said, there is a switch that allows you to change polarity, I believe there is 3 different polarity settings. So assuming you have a signal then set polarity to like +75 if you don't see it after a full spin of the circle then swap the polarity.