your nozzle is too close to the bed.
There should always be sufficient room below the nozzle for the filament to extrude. Even if the filament is 'smooshed' it should all go on the bed.
It sounds counter intuitive, but often you will get a much better layer by raising the nozzle slightly.

And yep, first layer is the most important.

So basically if the filament is being scraped up and sticking to the nozzle. Increase the nozzle gap and slow the first layer print speed down.

It's not unknown for particularly problematical filaments for me to go down as low as 1 or 2 % set print speed for the first layer.
Some prints the first layer can account for 50% of the overall print time. If the print is succesful - then who cares :-)

The only filaments where this doesn't apply tend to be flexible ones. Those I pretty much always run the first layer at 100%. Basically they have zero warp and are much stickier. Usually my first layer speed is 5 or 10 % of set maximum print speed.

Seems weird that anyone would prefer cura to simplify3d. But I guess we are all different.
I find that all the crucial settings are logical and easy to use in s3d and almost impossible to find in current cura.
The older versions of cura were much easier to use.