The new mod Vanilla Factions Expanded: Tribals offered a really neat start where you basically start out as cavemen only just discovering fire and you have to work up from there, no building, no mining, no agriculture. Really was a fun start having my cavemen grunt around a fire and slowly get the basics of technology started so we could actually survive. Unfortunately since the mod is still relatively new it still has some bugs which meant that once I hit the end of the super low tech stuff the popup for a new ideo never showed up which kinda just soured the run.

I lost a lot of caravans when I first started playing, losing your carries is always such a huge blow when you’re still getting going that I would just restart a lot. I’d usually recommend sticking to your base tile for a while outside of maybe trading caravans to nearby settlements until you have enough defenses you won’t eat shit if you get raided while you have colonists on the world map.

Pyros are fairly manageable but you need to focus on building everything in stone, or you put them in to a walled off solitary confinement cell with a nutrient paste dispenser so if they do feel like burning down the countryside it’s not gonna be a base wipe or they’ll get heat exhaustion and collapse quickly.