This is one of my favorite games to come out in the last few years. It has immaculate vibes. I like the ATV, I love the loop and experience, the concept is divine and the cool machinery for signals and processing is great. The new base is AMAZING, honestly one of my favorite bases in any game. It feels so unique, interesting, thematically appropriate, and it's cozy enough to provide comfort at night but open enough to still be spooky in it's corners. It rocks!
I do, however, think the default days/decay rate are particularly punishing and geared towards experienced players and wiki-divers. The first version I played had time to do tasks and experiment, money was tight but there was enough to still take some chances with purchasing things and find your way. I'm not saying it's dogshit but, it's clearly balanced for people that already play it and are gaming the mechanics. Sit some people that have played plenty of games but never heard of this down in front of the computer and I guarantee they will not operate at the capacity you are assuming and designing for.
The game is at it's hardest at the start, and only gets easier from there. It's a strange balance. It's all the more strange when the commonly accepted answers to figuring out how to get enough money to surpass breaking even and working towards that point, the answers all sound like they're adderall-fueled answers from schizophrenics. 'Obviously you need to get a hacksaw and break down the dumpsters, find the hidden log with 43 MREs in it that we all know about. buy burger ingredients and ship burgers back at 9.5 credits a burger (assuming you are collecting gibs and growing tomatoes, of course). If you don't have a lemon plantation by day 5 and a cryptofarm at day 10, what are you even doing??? And you better have towed the generator at the hole (obviously you know the hole, even though you just started) by hooking it up to the ATV and carrying the ATV by hand back to the base'. Like, c'mon man, it's awesome that you can do all of that, but it shouldn't be the baseline.
I'm just spitballing, but perhaps all the upgrades should come pre-installed (bear with me), and THOSE should burn out and need replacing? That way, over time, the game gets harder if you don't keep up with the modules burning out, and if a part of the grid suffers enough burnouts, THEN that part shuts down entirely - like the fuses, but the rate of decay is based on how healthy the entire grid is. All 'fuses' on the transformers has extremely low decay, but as soon as one burns out, the rest are working harder to compensate. Fix it fast, it only gets worse from here. Or if that's too much, maybe 3/4 of all module fuses are online. That way there's still a optimal point to climb to, but there's way less floundering in place to break even in the first nights. So the first week you should probably be replacing a part every day or so on your loop, and you should know where it is as long as you keep those systems running. If you do a great job it may be even less maintenance, as long as you keep up with it. Or not! But point still stands - its the hardest at the beginning, and it gets easier over time as long as you're fine with cheesing it like the game assumes you will. If you are a new player and not cheesing it, suffer. There's so many chores, you're too busy doing them to have much time to clean the base and explore and experiment, which was a huge part of the charm of the game.
You have to ask what experience you want the game to encourage - exploration, curiosity, a supposedly mundane technical job in a fringe location that you grow attached to and make your own while things around you evolve and reveal that there's more to this than meets the eye? Or a addy-fueled chore simulator that sometimes has interesting stuff happen in between the chores that you can't witness because you're too busy with your dayjob to experience the mystery and adventure? Because originally it was the former, and it moved to the latter, and enough people are on that point that it's clearly not a fringe personal opinion that this happened.