Coal, Early Game Exploration, and Smelting Wood

This is true i think 4 is a fair number well because coal is still a weak fuel.

 

The seeds are random and they luck into flower-tree seeds, on a flower magma toxic planet .

 

First off, yes I understand it boils down to technique. A new player's mining ability will be significantly worse than an experienced player's technique. I would like to point out that my technique is fine, and I managed to find enough fuel to get myself from one sector to another with ease, and still also had enough coal to build most of the tech and starmap upgrades.

However, the value of coal as a resource is entirely to heavy early in the game. Simply to build the robot boss, the robotic crafting table, the brain extractor, and the starmap upgrade mk 3 is 145 coal and 290 iron. That's just the steel. 145 coal is equivalent to nearly 2 system jumps. 290 iron is enough iron to craft 3 sets of iron armor, and 3 sets of iron weapons, with a little left over. And that coal isn't going to even be used as fuel, nor is that iron going to be equipment. It just vanishes into thin air as soon as you kill the robot. And considering how useless the brain extractor is on anything past Beta Sector you might as well just throw it in the trash. It's not even an impressive looking weapon either. Requiring an early player to use up 2 system jumps worth of coal just to advance to the next tier of equipment in a game this focused on exploration is ridiculous! If you want to build steel armor as well it'll take 212 coal to get to the next level of armor. Weapons are anywhere from 2 to 10 depending on what you build. A steel hunting bow is 15 steel bars, which is another 15 coal. Assuming a player builds a full suit of armor, the Beta Sector boss, the Brain Extractor, a pair of steel swords, and the steel hunting bow, you're looking at a total coal cost of 237 coal. That's nearly 2 and a half system jumps worth of coal. Just to get prepared to go to the third sector in the game. And then to get to the Gamma Sector you need another 100 coal just to get 200 fuel to jump to a new system in Gamma. So you're looking at a grand total of 337 coal. And it only gets worse from there.
This burden placed on early game coal can quite easily be remedied by changing the amount of wood it takes to make charcoal.

Also, if you have that much gold, copper, platinum, diamond, etc. stockpiled I think that the ratio of ore to ingots isn't the problem, I think it's more along the lines of you're mining out resources that you don't need anymore. The only thing you can justify getting at this point is fuel and copper. The fuel is for exploring, and the copper is for repairing your drill so you can get more fuel. I would say that the issue you bring up, that is to say the amount of ore given to a player later in the game, is something unrelated to exploration and early fuel costs. What your problem is is a lack of late game content. You've got a bunch of resources with nothing to use them on. There's no reason to get any more Impervium after you've built your preferred weapon of choice and your armor set. You have one reason to go back and get other tiers of armor, and that is cosmetic preference.

tl;dr: Early game coal resources are extremely over-inflated, late game is almost as bad, but not as noticeable due to easy fuel access once in sector X. Late game over abundance of ingots is due to a lack of game content, not due to low ore to ingot costs IMO.

 

You rather mean a lack of public content not lack there-of. Since the quests will most likely devour resources and etcs as an hungry black hole.
This game isn't Minecraft where the joy is in simply being ABLE to travel nilly-willy and freely, the joy is in EARNING the right to travel freely.
This is why im supposing they will incorporate a creative mode for pleebs that simply want to travel.