Okay, starting this guide back from scratch since I wrote it before we had the current research set-up that changed everything.

First of all, if you delete the perks the base personalities tend to spiral into a death dive. When characters do not like each other that have a greater chance of having bad conversations that make them like each other less, which results in more bad conversations...

When I first started play, I figured out you could get the tougher toons by simply selecting toons that had high initial costs. I now do the reverse. Having tough characters is not worth the cost in beginning toons. Nowadays I spam toons until I get the cheap ones, customize 3 of them to have the skills I need for the start, take a couple of levels of leadership so they have good conversations as opposed to bad ones, and be sure to grab a level of food so that they start with forest mushrooms they will need for the bottom tier of drinks. Tools are kinda nice, but if you really have to cut something from this list, cut the tools. But they also double as inferior weapons. (Basic tools do 2 blunt.)

Since you can save party builds, I like to use this feature, otherwise you have to remember what you did last time. Which is a pain if you had issues but cannot remember what needs to be on the new toons.

Custom characters are worth it, for my adults anyway. I tend to pick a trait that increases base morale, one to increase the moral bonus, and one to increase a desired skill learning speed (intelligent is good if they may need to switch roles or cover for more than a single skill.)

Oh, and do not play high difficulty levels until you know what you are doing. Morale spirals coupled with early attacks is not a good combination. Figuring out one or two things to deal with are better than trying to accommodate 5-6.

My start is a bit unusual. I child spam. I make 3 main characters that are custom, have infertility at max level (to make them cheaper) and one cheap advantage that makes them more social, and another disadvantage that does not preclude a needed skill. One needs to cut wood, one needs carpentry, and one needs farming (what level depends on how many points you have left, spread them evenly but slight farming if you must slight one). Also having herbalism on all three might help if you are trying to survive on a single unit of initial food (use up 'change' in this way, anyway). So, two levels of leadership, one (or 2) level(s) of food, or spent a bit of time foraging everything around you. A level of tools is nice as well, almost pointless to get more than one. (Just raise the mining or masonry a bit [with the leftover points] if you want the extra speed building, but wait until finishing the next step.)

I then add 6-8 infants to the party. They will cost less than a 100 points each, just refresh until you get ones under a 100 points. (You can actually get some that cost 10 points (or less,) but really it is not worth all that clicking. My limit is because you have to feed these suckers for 13 days until they become adults. However, a baby can drag logs to the stockpile since the toons seem to give birth to children with supernatural strength. So you have no transport issues. In fact lower your main toons to preclude them from transport. It makes no difference whose child they are, the toons will ignore human incest taboos. But you can pretend they are all orphans if it makes you feel better.

I also avoid couples, too many times the game gives you a couple that find each other repulsive. But natural relationships in game do not have this issue. And sometime I get to have a wedding on the first day because two of them happen to find each other attractive, giving a nice social buff, but costing you 8-10 hours of work and a bit of food. (It is worth it, IMO, because it accelerates those early friendships.)

The children are going to grow up with high stats, you will likely be able to come up with at least one child for each profession and they will be just as good as your starting toons the moment they hit 14 years of age. (Yes, children age a year every day, do not think about it too hard.)

For fast builds, I prefer to find water on level ground and build my buildings one level below the waterline at least 5 squares away from the water. The picture below is 4 squares out, so I restarted due to not having room for mechanical equipment to power my research analyzer. I could still put windmills and pumps outside, but that would be a lot of pipe and mechanisms.


In my experience, building on level ground takes too long, and completely underground generates so much soil I end up filling in low areas just to get rid of it. But if you dig just deep enough to generate soil to make your walls and ceiling out of, you get a nice compromise between the two. The one in the picture is half in a hill and half on flat ground, which is also an option.

Building:
Pick spots for your initial buildings. I like to just make everything 5x5, the ideal bedroom needs to be at least 4x5, but workshops could use a bit of extra space for stock. And, well, 6x6 gets a lot more time intensive (but adds the advantage of being able to build a new workshop before dismantling the last one, but easier just to have one more building than workshops and rotate them.) This also makes your rooms square which makes planning a lot easier.

Build the carpentry and the kitchen first. Until you have a supply of stone, the crafting shop is mostly useless (it can make paper to speed research, or clubs if you are too close to flies or monkeys.) Do not build anything else until you have these workshops fully enclosed. I put doors in the corners since this maximizes space you can build shelves, decor, chests, and the like.

If I do not need to get offense up quickly (close to starting location and do not have to forage widely for supplies) I build the weaver before the crafter. Because having armor keeps your toons from dying when they get attacked by things and because torches are nice for room buffs and being able to see what you are doing in the dark. I like to hold off on weapons until I can make spears, but making 3 clubs is not a bad idea. But doing it after torches is nice because you can take the good poles for weapons and leave the bad ones for the torches, that do not care so much about quality.

I make my research room the same size as everything else, but I often place a double sized room for a mainhall, tables along the long walls and painting(s) on the short ones (but one painting maxes decor). Bookshelves on each wall, but you can have a door in each corner if you want, the shelves do not do corners very well but coexist with doors.

Unless you have ground level stone, which I do not suggest since it takes to much time to build. But maybe you have a rock cropping nearby(?) You will need to have a stairwell. Again a 5x5 room does nicely, just place a double wide stairway on each edge (landing, steps, steps, steps, landing) and then tunnel out the other half of the room down below. If you are a bit OCD like me, you can set the dig to 3 to fit the room perfectly, than set the dig to 1 and cancel the floor. Might want to pause...

We were able to put off rooms and beds until this stage. If you used the infant spam tactic, a barrack(ish) set up is better than a bedroom at first. If you have to dig for stone, simply make a large room on the surface for beds, and either put the rooms on upper levels or lower ones a 5x5 room can accommodate 6 beds spaced one space apart and up against the walls on the ends. A double sized room does not add any additional beds since it only gets the 1 wide wall space added to it. But it does not hurt either, and you might find a use for that space.

Research weaving and masonry first. This way you can armor your troops while making torches with the lower quality cloth. And by the time you are done armoring everyone, you might have better access to weapons. Then basic weapons, the still for drinks (forest mushroom seeds with food come in handy here.) Mechanisms are needed if you are going to pump water, and for when you need more advanced research (this is a new twist, so I will write about it when I get it figured out). Spears are a big improvement over clubs. Prospecting is the least important early tech, since all the metal working is advanced tech.

The easiest way to power the base is windmills. I put them all on the first upward floor. So 1st floor for Europeans, and the second floor for us Americans (Chinese and Russians). I make the floor wider to accommodate the windmills. So 4 squares on each side for the windmill, (but you seem to be able to ignore the space behind for airflow [and go with 3] since it does not currently function as a deterrent. I suspect the dev will eventually fix that oversight) and 5 if you like to have a wall around the whole thing. I make my buildings double height 5 squares of room and the 6th square is ceiling/roof. This also makes the buildings tall enough to fit in the furnace, advanced furnace, and the auto-hammer. But if you choose to use water power, you can put this floor underground, closer to the ore, and slightly easier to arrange for the height since you can just mine downwards 3 more squares. (You only need 4 square height, but it feel wring to build through part of the building animation even though the building works fine with the top stuck into the ceiling.)

Annoyingly you have to find tin before you can make a furnace, but the only required metal seems to be tin. I would not recommend making a real life steam engine out of tin, but apparently your toons have slightly different physics to work with. They also seem to be fine with lead shields, which are also inadvisable in real life, but then your infants can drag trees home, so maybe lead is not that big a deal to them. But, yeah, having a degree in engineering makes this feel wrong at every level of my being.

I try not to do any iron working, I like to hold out for the advanced furnace and make steel, which requires coal. I have as yet to make a steam engine, but my current game is closer to the sea, so I will have access to saltwater and salt. I also plan to play with water power. I suspect you can daisy-chain watermills to self power, by pumping their own water [since that would be hard to write the code to stop us]. Updates will follow.

Reactions play an important role in getting things done. If your toons are feeling bad, they get nasty with each other and that accelerates the death spiral where they sulk instead of making food available (or even eating food in the same room with them) and all starve to death. But while making food part of their military gear and activating them can offset a bit of this, being impressed gives another negative mood buff, so is not an ideal solution. Sometimes it even does more harrn than good.

As you may guess from my comments about the leadership perk, I have done some experiments on character reactions. Even if you have no source for gemstones the "jewelry making 5" unlocks the trinket. This allows you to increase reaction modifiers and might be the source of complaint about "gay marriages" since if you have a character gift jewelry to another character of the same sex... Well, lets just say I had a lot of them just after I went on a crusade to eliminate all my clan rivalries. So, try and limit gifting to characters of a different gender, unless you have a few you would rather not have children. I will do more experiments to see of married charters are safe to gift in either direction.

Gifting should start off by getting as many couples set up as possible. However, the sweet spot for gifting seems to be around -5 to 5 reaction moods. Low chance of failure, and you can swing a slowly deteriorating relationship into one that slowly increases with minimum effort. Your toons being in good relationships increase their mood buffs which in turn reduces the bad conversations.

Trinkets are also a great way to get rid of substandard building material. If you have more than you can turn into torches and interior doors.

If you want a better overview of general combat the existing one is better than anything I have to offer at the moment.

However, if you want to get a colony up quick with minimal waste on defense...

Know how to make squads and order individuals. You can gang up on opponents if you outnumber them, but be sure and retreat with any unit that is wounded enough to be a liability. (Just make a new group for the walking wounded and send them somewhere safer.)