Minor bug, but the game seems to consider autonomous colonies as part of another faction rather than your own so you cannot create Astropolis around them.
Dunno if this is something that can be changed, but if a modded space station is abandons it loses all it's traits if you attempt to rehabilitate it again, this includes things like Resource Deposits for more mining-style stations. There any way to fix that?
Stations created using TASC should re-populate their resource deposits (if they have any) upon recolonization. Stations with deposits created by other mods will not do so unless I add support for them - what mod and what station did you notice this issue with?
Following Factions have special stations with traits or other special structures on them: Diable Avionics, Junkyard Dogs, Neutrino Corp's Nostalgia Edition, Outer Rim Alliance, Star Federation, Interstellar Imperium. I do wonder if it might be easier to just make it so that if a station decivilizes it instead turns Independent, Luddic Path, or Pirate.
Hmm, it's my intention that astropoli can be built around autonomous colonies. I'll fix that in the next patch.
I don't think it's a good idea to make stations simply change factions when they become decivilized - that's a big deviation from the vanilla behavior and I think it would cause a lot of problems.
Ideally stations from other mods with resource deposits or other conditions should regain those deposits/conditions if they're recolonized by the player. This is non-trivial to do from a coding standpoint though. I'll look into it but no promises!
Having gone through the vanilla game entirely, I'm going to look into this mod. One comment: your post doesn't actually explain what any of the terraforming stuff is. I was surprised to see settings talking about 400 days to change, 200 days, etc. Also not sure what the Siphon Station and Astropolis station are meant to do. Is the Siphon a replacement for the Gas Giant entirely or just an "extra" volatiles extraction over the completely vanilla gas giant colonization experience? The Astropolis is what exactly? The settings file also has options like Hydroponics and Cloning industries that have no specific information. Without a Readme explaining every option, I'm left to just ask here or literally download and install the mod, then check at whatever point what all this exactly does. Popularity of the mod aside, would be great to have these answered in the initial post.
Did you read the mod features guide in the original post? It covers some of the questions you asked here.
Yep, read the initial, for sure. Would be great to have all those settings and options explained. Something like a spoiler box that has all the options in the settings file that do not have a long explanation for what it is included and with a full explanation (the days thing I saw was initially confusing because, since it wasn't mentioned in the terraforming items area, I assumed it was something new or separate).
Yeah, you're right that there's no explanations for much of the non-default content (ex. Hydroponics and Cloning). I didn't want to include information about that in the original post because it would confuse players since it's not enabled by default, and it would entice players to enable the content even though it's my belief that the non-default content makes the gameplay experience worse (which is why it's non-default!).
If you do enable those buildings, the in-game tooltips for them explain how they function. If you merely read the tooltips, don't like what you see, and disable the content, it won't break your save.