You need the scanner on your multitool for this. If you trade in to another multitool, you need to make sure the scanner is there, or make a new one. You can probably save yourself some time and not bother scanning rocks and plants. I gave up on that. All the things you need to scan for a planet is animals. I've already encountered 1 planet where there was 3 things left to find and I couldn't find anything. Some planets do not even have any animals, but these usually have a ton of resources.
The game certainly gets better as time goes on. I hate these comments people complaining that it takes to long for the game to be good. IDK man, it seems pretty good from the beginning. After you make a couple warps, you will find new things when you scan a system. Go to these places and you'll be on your way to finding new stuff. I just got the Atlas v1 pass, the thing you need to open containers. Not yet the one to open doors. But I am not in a big rush to get to the center of the galaxy, or get the Atlas v2 pass or whatever.
Regarding combat, basically there is no real reason to use anything but the mining laser. For ground combat (you need some multitool mods for this, including rail adapter). And for space combat, the mining laser will lock onto an attacking ship where the regular weapons won't. So if you don't have good controls for space combat, you won't be able to hit anything.
It turns out the planets are fully deformable, akin to GeoMod from Red Faction. You can use grenades or a mod for mining laser to dig your own holes/tunnels. I can't wait for someone to see if they can "dig to china" on a planet or moon.
Planets can (at times) seem like they are small, but they certainly are not. I got a waypoint for something on the other side of the planet. It took 3 hours to fly there, with stops in between. It may make more sense to fly up into orbit to get to a far away waypoint.
