Hi Honey Poney, thank you so much for your valuable comment, this is exactly the kind of feedback we are looking for! :D
We are sorry that the first phase of your game was troubled... We thought to have it covered with the tutorial, but obviously we still have to work on the explanation. Your final guess about the actions is correct: they are represented by the hand symbol. In fact, we wanted to use the Research Station as a "toy example" to explain how machines should be repaired, but we hadn't considered the confusion we create with the concept of actions ("why can I repair the base if I have no actions available?"). Thanks for pointing that out!
Regarding the impact of malfunctions in the game: yes, they're not that disruptive at the moment. We preferred not to overdo it to avoid frustration, but perhaps this made the last phases of the game too easy.
However, the direction in which we wanted to ideally expand the game (...if the GWJ had lasted months) involves many more machines, scattered across the Antarctic wilderness. This idea lines up with what you said about the sense of exploration: if a fish-producing machine breaks down, there's another one that produces the same resource, that I need to discover. In this scenario, having more malfunctions would not cause soft-locks; instead, it would gently push that sense of exploration. Of course that's far from the actual game, but I'm happy that we still managed to convey a bit of that :)
Commenting your last paragraphs, in our conception the goal is (*should be) to escape from the base, not to build the most powerful production engine. That's the reason why the snowmobile is there from the beginning, and - as you correctly guessed - there's a high score that invites optimization :) Also because, having to include malfunctions in the gameplay, they could be perceived radically differently according to the game genre: a resource-management game in which production pipelines are randomly broken is just frustrating, whereas a survival game in which you cannot rely on your tools is accepted and -somewhat- expected ;)
Again, thank you so much for your comment. We deeply appreciated it and we'll make good use of your suggestions!