Im loving A17 but Ive some balance suggestions
1 - bicycle/minibike
I would make minibike available little bit later on. By the time you can craft a bicycle if you wait like 3-4 more levels you can craft a mini bike, so the bicycle is kinda useless. Specially considering we cant get acid super easily, so I totally skipped it for 1-2 days to save resources to craft a mini bike instead. If you push minibike for more 5-10 levels would be a much closer decision between wait or get a bicycle.
2 - weapons drops
You clear a dungeon to the fat loot room or a shotgun messiah and you get way too much weapons. It's broken at this point, we're talking about 4-5 weapons in 1 single poi. I get it TFP wanted to make feel rewarding beat those ferals before the loot, but its over the top. TFP made the game harder at first glance but it gets easy really fast due to amount of weapons you can get super fast.
3 - weapon mods
To craft first tier of them kinda early on you need to spec pretty heavily on it, so I would suggest to have the most simple ones (like add a flashlight) at science level 1.
4 - heavy armor
150 hp + steel armor + health regen + pain resistance (? cant recall the perk name) we get way too tank. we can fight wandering hordes at night gs +100 without break a sweat. yeah the stam and movement drawbacks are a great idea, but still pretty op atm.
5 - tools levels
I could be wrong but it seems we dont have that many mods for our tools, so virtually a tool level 3 and a tool level 6 are the same. I would rather see a slightly damage increase and less mod slots overall. maybe something like lvl 5 has 2, level 6 has 3 slots but damage increases 1 through 4. lvl 4 without mod slots and lvl 5 unmodded would have same damage so lvl 5-6 would have the advantage of mod slots.
6 - harvesting
Iron pickaxe is more efficient than steel pickaxe. iron one you can power attack super fast while the steel is slow as F. So when you get a higher tier tool, it should perform better. Also the amount of resources you get its almost the same, I was harvesting 47 iron from boulders, got a steel pickaxe and it takes more time to harvest 49. so nerf one or buff the other, I dont have a preference.
Another thing about harvesting is wood, depending the tree hp its better power attack or basic attack which doesnt make a lot of sense. So you guys (TFP) need to decide which one harvest more, doesnt matter if the tree has 900 or 1200 hp, one attack should give me more resources than the other. Not like, oh its 900 tree I should do basic attacks, a 1200 tree I should power attack type of thing.
Personally I would make basic attacks always give more resources and power attacks give less but you destroy boulder/tree faster. It's basically I cut this tree carefully and slowly I get more wood than if I go psycho-crazy mode to put it down as fast as possible.
A side note, make the moaning while power attacking stuff less frequent, it was fun at the start but after 50 hours it gets super annoying.
im sorry for the WoT