Nope, I restarted on a vanilla server a while back. Default money, 1x mining, no help from anyone. Used my starting money wisely, set up a ground base for some factories, a turret to keep the pirates away from said ground base, and concentrated on upgrading my mining ship.
Died a few times by pirates until I got the turret up, then I was fine. Got a mega miner built the first night, ran off some warp gate modules and explosive modules to sell for fast money, and started building my station the next day.
Like minecraft, if you don't know what you're doing, you die a lot until you learn "Hey, I need to prioritize here and get a house and some lights up before dark, and stop trying to hug the Creepers!" Same thing here, only replace "house" with "base with factories" and "stop hugging creepers" with "build a turret".