It is weird that that effects Settlers, but that mod is actually included in Stones to Stars, so yeah, issues.

Okay, I think I figured it out. Looks like it was my "Submarines ignore borders" mod. Weird.

It still wasn't working, so I decided to do some exploratory surgery, if you take my meaning. With just your mods, everything does actually work fine. I just don't recall adding any mods that were not yours since the last time everything worked okay. I can't even think of a mod that I've installed that affects settlers in the first place. So I'm enabling them in batches to see which one is an issue.

I believe currently they're one version apart on the workshop. All my civ mods are due to be updated soon, I'm combing through them for bugs. (This SHOULD work tho anyway)

Alright, looks like I had to disable Stones to Stars and Empire Ascendant to be able to start with a settler. The civ I use does not matter. Should Empire Ascendant and Stones to Stars have different version numbers?

Actually, I tried the one for Aksum and got the same result. Odd. I will experiment further.

I'm not sure why, but this mod appears to be broken. Whenever I try to start a game, it starts me with no settler (or pathfinder), ending the game with a loss automatically. I do have other mods installed, but nothing I haven't successfully used with your mods before.

Nice!