Speaking of rock people, Today I tried a Lithoid species with the ring world start. I figured taking one of the strategic resource poop traits might help accelerate developing the ring world but honestly it was a very slow start, and at about 35 years in I'm basically playing tall.
-Ring world start
-Lithoids, Crystal shedding, Natural Engineers, Strong, Unruly
-Radical Materialist, Pacifist; Democratic, Technocracy and Something Else
The ring world obviously provides no minerals, but also the starting district is a useless farming one, even if your species doesn't eat. Some of the food went into a bio-reactor, while the rest I dumped into the market. Worse still the neighboring habitable worlds were tropical ones with very little mining districts. Ended up taking a small arctic one, with only 65% habitability due to low gravity but it had like 8 mining slots to eat. What helped was getting basic robot tech super early, and my first governor getting the landscaping trait which makes clearing blockers cheaper and faster.
The economy was kinda shit until I could replace that farm district for a city one and later a research one as well. Problem is now there's like 20+ jobs open and lithoid pop growth won't fill that anytime soon. A migration treaty's fixing that a bit but its not great.
A big problem now is influence. In spite of being materialist/pacifist, 25% of the rock guys want to take over the galaxy for whatever reason. Getting only like 2 inf per month really slows down expansion.