Same issue here. No merchants, no HR person, no sub upgrade person.

Just using LUA+dynamic europa.

... Found out that merchants are spawning.. but only in like 10% of stations now, so you have to go 4+ hops just to get to a station with an upgrade seller to get a mineral scanner, and good luck not running outta fuel with 0 engineering merchants selling fuel along the way.

Really just broken. Every station *needs* the engineering merchant who sells fuel rods/welding fuel and every 2nd station needs to sell something to make coilgun ammo outta or most ships are just screwed, especially at the start of the game.

The game most of the time spawns you at an "outpost" station which is the smallest habitation stage.
We sadly can't control the starting outpost (Regalis please add configurable starting outposts!!!)
However there should always be a quartermaster and a reactor operator on stations that don't feature a store from which you can buy overpriced rods and welding fuel to keep you going.

But yes we should probably increase the amount of fully developed stations in the first biome.

I absolutely HATE the quest vendor. I always think there will be an actual quest but nope, just that jerk again. Please remove him and just have a regular engineering merchant.

Fun fact:

You can't mod custom merchants, so you either have to use the default merchants who can sell everything or vending machines or events

can we have fuel rods/welding fuel/coilgun ammo in the vending machines then!?!

It would make them useful for a change lol.

The issue is that to get items sold in either merchants or vending machines, you need to override the item itself, which means we would have to override a TON of items and this would kill mod compatibility across the board

we've been begging the devs for a solution so events is the only thing we can settle on atm