Before evolving you can see what mats the next version will take by previewing evolution and hitting the craft tab. It also changes the name from copper to silver, or silver to malachite, for example my shredder is changing from a silver shredder to a malachite shredder if I evolve. I have some malachite, but not nearly enough to sustain making enough sniper rifles til I get to canny valley.
In the alpha, I fell into this pitfall of making my weapons silver kinda early before I had a stockpile of silver saved up. So when I started dying a bit more because my power level was not high enough (because I wasn't spending survivor xp mostly), I ran into resource shortage on both gizmos and silver. This time around, these pitfalls I avoided. I think they increased the silver node rate too. And perhaps gizmos as well although I am not sure if it is that or I am just better at finding them.
