Ores should be less common, but in larger veins

It would be better to have large ore veins and have them be quite rare, that way you could build an outpost for each resource you need and would have to travel to it. This would lead to exploration, building more infrastructure and well... engineering. Setting up mines, building asteroid outposts and various ships to transport resources or even deep mining drills and trains would actually make sense in terms of gameplay rather than just being purely for roleplaying.

On planets they could be in the form of deep ore veins (whether that be deep on flat lands or deep within a mountain), with asteroids, it could be rare asteroids that are mostly just one resource. There should still be smaller deposits here and there near the surface as well as on some asteroids to make it possible to get your early game set up, but there should be way less of them so it's not a viable strategy to rely on them long term.

I think this was the largest issue with the first game, most of what you did didn't have a reason other than for roleplay. The way it is now, you don't really need to build any of the aforementioned, because you can just go around gathering the random blobs of resources. No need for any infrastructure, no need for any outpost, no need to even build a proper mine, which I think makes the survival really shallow.