I'm hoping that the devs make a few changes regarding progression, refining speeds, and add things more interesting to the core gameplay loop before I pick this back up again.

I have played 22 hours, and still have not unlocked all of the tier one upgrades. This is not due to skill issue, nor is it due to anything I as a player can do. It's artificial inflation of gameplay time, where to get one upgrade costs 40k materials to be refined for 10+ hours just to get the base materials to start thinking about getting an upgrade. I have also played a good number of hours of this game at 16x speed because the refining speeds are so painfully, unnecessarily slow. Mind, the upgrade I'm looking at is a minor increase in stats, not something major. Also, these materials you need are limited in how many you can store on your ship at any time, and with mass limitations before you can jump away from an asteroid if you run out of time there you have to dump the vast majority of anything you've mined before you are forced to jump away. It's massively frustrating. Asking this much time investment for so little return is not only baffling, it's insulting.

This game is an idle game in disguise at the moment, lacking only microtransactions. The core gameplay loop isn't interesting enough to make up for the massive demand of time put on the player - it does not respect the player's time.
If you want a fun or chill game, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. You'll have more fun, you'll do more, and you'll get more gratification than this grindfest. Respect your own time, give this one a miss.

Nice concept, it's a mayor grind though. To big in my opinion.

Progress is extremely slow, resources are not sold for enough money to get mining upgrades at a decent pace.
Ship upgrades cost tons of resources and money, aka double the mining efforts.
You need to mine about 4-5 asteroids to get 1 decent upgrade and it takes anywhere between 15 and 25 minutes to mine.
Randomness of the asteroids mostly means you need 2 to 3 runs (mining - back to station) before you find what you need to complete 1 quest. Some of which grant enough cash for a proper upgrade, but not always.

Mining in the meantime gets really repetitive, pirates are a bit of distraction and avoiding asteroids while flying loses it's charm quickly.

Overall, not a bad game, just too repetitive as it is right now.

gg