I recommend to be sure to read the whole list once before you start.

1. Build a jetty and a cistern so that the entrance of the cistern is very close to the jetty.

2. Set 5 people to gather water. You can reduce this to 3 if needed in the beginning. Keep an eye on this.

3. Build a fishing dock and a gatherers post/hunter in a forest somewhere. Alternatively you can build a fishing dock and a 10x10 farm with 2 employees max but staffed with 1 for now. Make sure you make the farms in a square formation with space in the middle for an irrigator.

4. Build 6 houses so you can get the babies going. Make sure you build houses near to where your jobs are. 2 workers per house.

5. Build a school ASAP, educated workers are very important.

6. Build a foresters hut and a scrapyard and staff with 1 person for now who is cutting and planting. Upgrade your van.

7. You need to get mask production started quickly and resources stockpiled for advanced buildings so make 5 recyclers. Set 2 to plastic, 2 to cloth, and 1 to metal. You will need some electronics for the hospital before the first drought hits so you might want to make it 6. Don't be afraid to take people off here if you need people in a pinch. In the future when you have enough excess workers, switch to a refinery. It is faster and more efficient than recyclers, BUT I would keep recyclers for cloth and place them right next to the tailors. Relying on the refinery for cloth can produce bottlenecks because you often need more of it than other resources.

8. Build a tailor close to the recyclers and a house for it. You will need to make a few tailors pretty quickly, but the main bottleneck is cloth. So make sure you have enough recyclers. I think 3 is good per tailor but you will have to experiment. Don't make more tailors until you're sure your cloth bottleneck is fixed.

9. Your goto for food is farms. Make sure your food is going up each season or you don't have enough farms. A 10x10 farm works best with 2 people to plant and harvest but can get by with 1. Make sure they have a warehouse close by to drop off the food. If you are not hovering at max food after a while, something is wrong.

10. Get tool production up ASAP before you run out and start making them out of scrap at first. Once you have built all the things that need metal you can use them for tools.

11. Build a well and rain collector as soon as you see the first drought coming or earlier and make sure it is built as priority. Each cistern should have 2 or 3 rain collectors and 1 well. Make sure you tell each cistern to not collect from the RCs until the drought hits. This allows them to keep collecting even if there is no lake.

12. If your water is not 1500 and increasing every season, you don't have enough water carriers. So build another jetty, cistern, and well. Keep the well staffed only during droughts.

13. Soon we will upgrade to water towers with filtration so the radiation content wont matter.

14. Build a graveyard ASAP and staff it with 2 people. Make sure you reassign its radius to be around the most people.

15. Build a hospital and herb gatherer asap before the first drought if possible and staff the gatherer so that you have a surplus of about 150 at all times. Max out staff at the hospital when an outbreak occurs.

16. Increase resource gathering when needed by assigning more workers or preferably building more gathering buildings which is more efficient than more people at one location.

17. Make sure you keep up with food production. You need to have farms arranged around irrigators. You should have enough excess water production where you can run the irrigators all the time on low. Make sure you build some orchards as well. Maybe 50/50

18. Once you build 20 houses, switch to the larger communal housing. This will cap your population and allow you to introduce more houses slowly when you want to expand.

19. Make sure the weather station covers your crops at medium radiation. This will cause some dryness issues, so make sure you have irrigators working to compensate. Irrigators require someone to go to them to turn them on for them to work. During droughts you may have to set the irrgation to medium even.

20. Make sure you get charcoal production with 1 employee up at least after the first drought, because youll want to have water towers sooner rather than later with filtration.

21. Make sure you switch to metal tools.

22. Make sure you have enough masks being produced.

23. If you enter into a famine or lack of water it is important you remove all staff from resource gathering like wood and move everyone to gathering food and water. The reason is that during a famine, the field workers or water gatherers eat the food they need as they harvest, so others wont get any quick enough. You need to produce a serious excess to counter a death spiral.

24. Make sure you build storage and communal housing near your scrapyards as you move them to new places. This will increase their efficiency.

25. Build markets every so often so their circles are touching. This way workers can just go to one place to get everything they need instead of a bunch of different locations. Staff them with enough people to keep it stocked adequately taking into consideration demand and distance to gather supplies. This could be from 1 person to 12.

From here you can experiment. Build a solar panel, battery, and connect your workshops/recyclers. This will help them be more efficient.