How do you start out?

Here is how a colony typically starts for me:

1 Decline the tutorial. Done it a couple of time. Ready to move on.
2 Pause the game. The only part of the tutorial experience that I still like is the time to check out my landing spot.
3 Select the level terrain tool to see if I have a decent area of flat ground to work with. I am looking for space for a kitchen and a preliminary stockpile. I will create one or two level terrain jobs to get my base area started.
4 Build a kitchen, It doesn't need a carpentry shop to be built, and food is the biggest driver in the game, in my opinion. I create a 4x6 blueprint near the edge of my starting space, place a door on one side, and two stone ovens opposite the door.
5 If the open area was large enough for a good starting stockpile, I place it two space in front of the kitchen, 8 wide and as long as I can fit, up to about 16 or so... it hangs out one space to either side of the kitchen. My next couple of buildings will be 2 spaces from the kitchen (or each other), allowing an identically sized stockpile in front of the new buildings, as needed.
6. Select one or more of the nearest rhyolite boulders for mining.
7. Select two to three groupings of 3 or 4 trees for chopping jobs.
8. Press the space bar and hope none of my colonists gets smashed by a crate.

 

1. Enable NCO hunting and hauling
2. On the "western" (top left) side of the drop zone, designate terrain flattening as necessary
3. Put in a 2x5 block of full size farms running north-south, but don't grow anything yet
4. Put in a 14x28 stockpile filtered to food and weapons, long axis north-south, immediately adjacent to the farms, south-aligned
5. Ten-oven kitchen off southern west edge of stockpile
6. Designate a single large harvest job each for Rhyolite and lumber based on revealed resources
7. Carpentry shop of north end of stockpile, second stockpile filtered to raw, refined and building materials north of that
8. Ceramics workshop west of second stockpile
9. Brewery south of first stockpile
10. Go make a coffee and wait for the colonists to catch up
11. Upon nightfall, create up to six small forage jobs
12. When kitchen competes structure (but before first module builds) start southernmost field growing wheat

(Wheat yields happiness through bread and forgetfulness through beer & beer derivatives. Apart from a field each of flax and bamboo, it's all my colonies grow, with farms brought online slowly to meet demand. Foraging keeps the ovens busy until harvesting begins.)

 

1. Find a big flat space or one easily flattened
2. Set workers to mining rhyolite and chopping timber
3. Build some stockpiles surrounding a radio mast
4. Add some farms around the radio mast as well - usually start with a full-sized wheat farm and a half-sized flax farm; set someone to mining clay if they're done with chopping trees
5. Build a carpentry shop, just big enough for 3 work benches and one desk. Once finished I allow my carpenter's crew to continue to chop wood and build buildings, and order them to keep a minimum of around 20 planks on hand.
6. Build a kitchen. In the past I've started with just 2 stoves but lately I've been upping that to 4. Set folks to foraging the area and once the ovens are complete get them cooking.
7. If at this point things seem fairly peaceful (no bandits or fishpeople so far) I set my NCO to hauling. If there are dodos or beetles in the area I'll have him/her hunt, but if there are aurochs I hold off until I get a soldier with a rifle. Had too many NCO's get mauled and cowardly by pistol-hunting those beasts.
8. Build a ceramics workshop. Once complete I allow this crew to continue to mine and construct, and I have them keep a minimum of around 30 bricks on hand.
9. Explore the surroundings and set people to mining if nodes are found - preferably starting with coal and hematite.
10 . Build a metal workshop - I usually do a brick charcoal oven and iron smelter along with the crucible. As immigrants arrive I tend to make this my biggest crew.
11. Housing
12. As soon as a flax crop is in, build a textile shop
13. Add more farms as population increases

and so forth...

 

1. Close the tutorial.
2. Take a second to look around; find a flat area that borders a forest.
3. Change the job filter on my military crew so they can hunt animals for food.
4. Build a small Carpentry there - just large enough to hold two Carpentry Workbenches, and maybe one cot.
5. Draw out a smallish stockpile, 5x5 or so.
6. When the workshop is well under way, build a moderate-sized kitchen that can hold at least 5 ovens comfortably, but only build 2 small ovens in it. When more ovens are required, build stone ovens.
7. From this point forward, any time I assign a Crew to workshop, I change their job filters so they'll continue doing all jobs, not just their workshop jobs, with the exception of the Kitchen Crew, who do nothing but cook at all times.
8. Draw a stockpile beside the kitchen that only accepts food; change the old stockpile to exclude all food.
9. Queue up around 10 planks from the Carpentry, for future use.
10. Around the time the kitchen becomes functional, build a Lower Class House that can eventually hold 6-8 cots. For now, only build enough cots to bring the total in the colony to 4 or 5, counting cots in the Carpentry or Kitchen.
11. Consider one full-size farm plot for a basic food crop (maize or cabbage), forage for fungus, etc.

 

1. Skip tutorial.
2. Pause the game.
3. Find a 16x8 flat area.
4. Build a L-shaped Carpentry Workshop, 8x8 with a 4x4 square cut from one of the corners.
5. Build a L-shaped Ceramics Workshop, mirroring the Carpentry Workshop layout. Put an iron kiln in it.
6. Since you have a C-shaped building, put the large doors on the bits sticking forward, and place a 4x8 to 6x8 raw resource stockpile in the recess. Put a pair of small doors near the inside corners of the building, just so they point to the stockpile.
7. Plot out two 5x7 farms, one for Wheat, the other one for Pumpkins.
8. Start gathering wood and stone.
9. Once the Carpentry Workshop is done, put a standing order for five planks.
10. Near the farm, build a 6x6 kitchen with two stone ovens.
11. Build a colony of 6x6 Lower Class Houses, with two cots, two wardrobes and a table and chair each.

 

1. Start game.
2. Make poor decisions.
3. Wonder how it all went wrong.

 

I find it a startling coincidence that 40A now provides a starting option that almost feels tailored to my style of colony creation,

 

1. Do the tutorial in case they've added something new and shiny
2. Flatten
3. Forage
4. Farms - 2 cabbage, 1 wheat
5. Chop down every tree in the starting square
6. Mine any grey stone in the area
7. Stockpile
While this is going, plop down the kitchen, carpentry, and lowerclass bunkhouse

Turns out this works pretty great for the group starting option. Its a lot of work, but I like getting my food and sleeping area setup as quickly as possible.