First off, I'll say that a lot of the discourse about this update seems way too heated. Calm down guys, it's a test build for a game that is barely entering its alpha. You're digging your fingers into wet batter seconds after it entered the oven and complaining that it's not a cake yet.
- Controls
I think they're fine. A lot of people have difficulty trying to remember whether you have to hold alt or shift or nothing while interacting with something. I never had trouble with it, but I'm a longtime Dwarf Fortress enjoyer (from before that game had an actual UI), so I'm not a good person to judge bad control schemes. With this in mind, the new control scheme makes sense for new player accessibility and seems perfectly functional. I didn't have much trouble adapting to the new style... but again, my tolerance for insane control schemes is higher than the average person, so my feedback isn't worth much here.
That said, there really needs to be an option to swap to legacy controls. Making the new controls not negotiable strikes me as a bad choice no matter what your preference is. Giving the option to swap between schemes feels like the best way to make everyone happy.
- The ATV
I love the upgrades. I no longer have to nail my map and radio to my ride and argue with the janky physics that result from that. I deeply appreciate the bumper upgrade, because the ATV always felt so fragile that I never wanted to go too fast with it before. In the same vein, flying off your ATV is funny the first time and really irritating the fiftieth time, so the seatbelt upgrade is also a very welcome addition. I like that these are purchasable upgrades, since it now feels like you've earned the right to be reckless on your ATV after earning enough to buy these upgrades.
That said... why a car battery? Why individual tire durability? The only thing the car battery does is incentivize you not to leave the lights on, and beyond that it's just "second more expensive fuel tank". The tire durability adds nothing at all aside from irritation, as you have to individually detach each of the tires and repair them all with your toolbox. ATV health and fuel were fine as they were, these new mechanics don't add anything except additional tedium and expenses.
- Acquiring Signals
Mixed feelings on this one... I like triangulating signals, it's oddly satisfying drawing a triangle around a dot. I really like that pinging no longer has a random chance of failing for no reason, that was always my biggest gripe with the old system.
However, tying the coordinate radars to the ping cooldown is agony. I got two signals with the new system and proceeded to cheat myself enough money to fully upgrade the ping cooldown... and even then it was still annoying if tolerable. Maybe it would be okay to have this insane cooldown, if the signals didn't randomly disappear. The signals disappearing without warning was already something that annoyed me in the previous version, but now combined with how long it takes to set up a ping, it's perhaps what pisses me off most in the whole game. Nothing else got me to clench my teeth quite as much as slowly setting up my little triangle, pinging the signal and walking away to do something... before realizing I don't hear the satellites moving because the signal randomly vanished before the ping actually finished.
If this slow process is going to be the new system, the signals cannot disappear while they're on screen. That quirk alone makes this mechanic annoying at max upgraded cooldown, and downright intolerable with no upgrades at all.
- The Drone
More mixed feelings. I like being able to fit anything you can hold into the drone bag. I like being able to sell things opportunistically whenever the drone shows up.
I don't like not being able to sell my item boxes anymore, since that was a pretty convenient way to dispose of massive amounts of trash in one go. Selling mass amounts of trash is now a terribly tedious practice of painstakingly transferring objects from one inventory to another. I also don't like having to manually tell the drone to go away every midnight. Finally, I don't like how goddang loud it is. Seriously, that thing is deafening.
- Floppy Hashes
Can you believe there are even more mixed feelings? The process of getting the data from satellites is pretty satisfying. Slapping a floppy in and entering the request command, then putting it into the computer and transferring the data to the zip drive, all of this feels cool. The floppies having a set read/write limit before they break is pretty accurate to how unreliable they are (though of course real life floppies are not generous enough to inform you when they were going to break, unfortunately). I even like the fact that you can't tell what's on the floppy until you get back to the computer and read it, so carrying your trusty notebook is incentivized to help you remember where you're going next and where you've already been.
But the server failures... these need to go, full stop. Waiting in the base for your crappy equipment is fine, because there is always something else to do there. Download taking forever? That's okay, just clean up, or cook some food, or decorate, or go repair, or get hashes, or watch your TV, or just sleep, and on and on. Out with the satellites however, you've got nothing. You're just sitting there, sometimes for multiple minutes, doing nothing. Forcing the player to stare at a wall for several minutes every ingame day is a good way to incentivize buying server upgrades, I'll give you that, but I feel like any mechanic that has your players checking their phones in boredom is definitively bad design.
- Coordinate Radars
These go down way too often. Upon running out of fuses for them, I thought to myself "oh well I don't mind going out to fix them every once in a while". One of them proceeded to go down every. single. day. Once, two of them went down in the same day. I decided to uncheck the coordinate tower decay option after that, but the typo in that option labeling it "recay" should have been my hint that I was going to be disappointed, because unchecking that did nothing. Thus I cheated 24 fuses into existence and proceeded to max all of them out so I never have to think about them until it's time to cheat myself another 24 fuses. Oh, speaking of fuses...
- Fuses
100 is too much. Way, way, way too much. Server upgrades are just 25 points, but fuses are 100!? Maxing out the coordinate radars should not cost 2400 points, that's absolutely ridiculous.
I also don't like that you can put fuses in the radio tower. I like having to periodically go up there, both because I enjoy the view and there are events waiting for you. Unlike the coordinate radars, the radio tower goes down sparingly enough that putting fuses into it just completely disables that mechanic for a long time. I think maxing out the radio tower fuses might just make it completely unbreakable for the entire duration of the story. I haven't tested that, but the fuses the thing starts with lasted until day 25 or something like that for me.
- Transformers
No mixed or negative feelings here, I like the changes. The minigames are satisfying, and I feel like I'm actually fixing the thing instead of just pressing a button to turn it on after it randomly decided to turn off. Speaking of minigames...
- New Server Repair Minigames
I feel like all of the new ones take too long to complete. That said, you can turn the ones you don't like off, so I rate this as a 100% positive change. People bad at math can feel more at ease with this game, and people relatively good at it can turn off all the extra games and breeze through server repairs at their leisure. Or people who like variety can turn them all on, just for kicks. It's a win/win, a great addition.
...Though the hacking minigame both needs a much bigger font and the viable words need to stand out from the random characters a lot more. That probably would have been my second favorite minigame of the lot were it not for the consistent eyestrain it caused.
- Upgrade Modules
I like them. I dislike that there's not enough space for every module in the radar, but that's the extent of my criticism for this addition.
...Actually, perhaps one more criticism. Instead of just blowing up the player when they try to insert a module while the power is on, just have the game refuse and give a notification that says "turn the power off first" or something. I figured out that I had to turn the power off through experimentation only after I had tried every slot in the console. I feel like a good chunk of players might just give up after the first few failed attempts and either look it up online or just stop bothering with the upgrade modules altogether. Video game logic has taught most of us that plugging upgrades into machines that are powered on has no consequences, so some clarity here would be appreciated.
That's the extent of what I can think of for now, I may come back and edit in some more thoughts later if they occur to me. All-in-all, I like the direction of a lot of these changes, I just feel like they need serious balancing tweaks.