Thanks for the feedback. I agree that an in-game tutorial would be useful. I posted something into the itch description.
As for the living spaces specifically, their value isn't used for anything. It was planned that you'd need those when rescuing people from the towns, but I changed that. Instead the player can't discard them, which forces the player to build a larger machine. And I forgot to remove the "livingSpaces" stat from the game :)