Looking good! How are you getting around, generally? Trucks?
I'm really getting annoyed by the desert start location. The closest quartz is under a mountain inaccessible unless I finish researching Nobelisk, and the second-closest is 2.5km away through impassible terrain filled with unkillable monsters.
It's less "challenging" and more... "needlessly obnoxious".
In this save, I'm just using muh Factory Cart. Haven't built hypertubes, cause my wife won't use them, they make her nauseous. Maybe eventually.
Planning to use trucks and tractors for transporting goods, though.
Which desert are you taling about? The same as us, Rocky Desert? That Quartz cave actually has 3 entrances, only 1 is blocked by boulders. If you're talking about the Dune Desert, they must've changed it a fair bit, none of that rings a bell.