Start on the planet surface. You awake in a small hut with an npc having found you. They found a damage communicator that will take him a while to fix(the end of the tutorial), in the meantime you should explore and build. You respawn at the hut when you die. Eventually you get your communicator back. Its too late for the rest of us but the moment a new player gets their fixed communicator and gets beamed aboard their own ship to travel to other planets would be pretty amazing and is currently not being used.
This would be great (waking up after having landed in an escape pod from your ship would explain how it belongs to the same species as you) except.. starting planets are randomised. If you, as has happened to me a few times, end up on a planet with an inhospitable atmosphere and instagibbing mini bosses on both sides of the spawn point then you'd be in for a pretty miserable time of it if you couldn't get back to the ship (particularly if one of them mini bosses follows you back to the hut). If the starting planet could be strictly controlled so it's always a warm Forest biome without mini bosses then I'd be all for this idea. The escape pod could even have determined that the planet was habitable to explain why it's always forested and "safe".
