The credit editor is all you really need, and it works. once you get the market enabled you can buy everything else. Slag option was amazing but just upgrade your drones to cargo type and it doesn't matter.
Yeah thats eems to be the only thing I use. And only just once. once you have money you can buy research points, the research cheat is a a pain but I made a macro to speed up the process. I dont even use the slag option anymore since you need it for bricks.