Add concrete to make the early game easier instead of oversimplifying everything

Just a little idea to prevent the game from being oversimplified, while still making the early game easier.

The problem with the early game in SE is that a huge amount of materials is needed just to build a little starter base.

A good portion of the materials is iron, which is only used to build a basic structure with armor blocks. Iron has to be processed by machines to get the needed steel plates.

So, what Keen has done is:

• Simplified how resources are obtained (materials from environmental voxels)
• Simplified the production chain (no ingots and backpack building)

What if these exact issues could be countered by adding concrete blocks?

• Concrete could be a cheap building block that can be obtained by mining stone and crafting it via backpack building.
• This would massively reduce the amount of required iron.
• The most remaining blocks aren't that expensive, so that the total amount of required resources is much lower.
• Without that high demand for resources, it's not necessary to have materials from environmental voxels everywhere. It could be replaced with a more realistic and believable approach.
• It's also not necessary to simplify the production chain that much because it loses a bit of its relevance in the early game (fewer items to produce). Add some slow, small but cheap machines for the early game but leave ingots in.
• Backpack building should be limited to building concrete blocks and producing certain items from ingots (not smelting ores!), to keep it more or less believable and having a dedicated smelting/refining step in the game (this would be similar to Minecraft and Factorio, btw).

This wouldn't turn SE into a hyper realistic game, but it would be a fair compromise between believability and playability.

The idea of adding concrete is far from new and has countless votes on this site, but adding it now makes more sense than ever.

Nice side effects:

• There would be a noticeable difference between building a base (concrete blocks) and a ship (armor blocks).
• If concrete could not be crafted from asteroids, there would also be a difference in difficulty level between space and planetary gameplay.