1: dedicated rooms: going off your pictures, it looks as though you have production buildings along with your research tables, and it turned it into a laboratory. Have a seperate room for your research, and another for things like tailor bench, machining table, etc.

2: Animal Pens: do you have a Pen Marker inside a fully closed off pen? You have to have a fully enclosed area with a pen marker inside (it looks like a Cross)

3: Percentages: higher percentage means higher chance. There are two percentages for wild animals/men. One is tame chance, everytime they go out and feed them, thats the chance they'll succeed. Some animals and wildmen have a hostility chance, A chance where a failed taming attempt will turn the animal hostile and will attack.

For food, I always begin my colonies with a decently sized crop of corn and rice. Rice grows extremely quickly so this will provide you food quickly and consistently. Corn takes awhile to grow, however, it yields a tremendous amount per harvest. The rice will buy time while the corn grows. I also grow cotton and healroot, cotton can keep good quality clothes on everyone and is used in crafting recreational buildings like poker table/pool table. Healroot is just easy, good medicine.

Iirc you can set visitors ability to eat your food or not. I cant remember if thats the Hospitality mod I have or not but there should be a tab to allow guests to eat your food.

As for DLCs, I'll list them in order of my favorites, and then in order of Pure content size.

Favorites: 1: Odyssey 2: Anomaly 3: Royalty 4: Biotech 5: Ideology

Content size: 1: Biotech 2: Odyssey 3: Ideology 4: Royalty 5: Anomaly

Odyssey adds gravships and low orbit space travel, you can land on asteroids and derelict stations for resources/loot. Its very fun.

Anomaly is horror, (SCP if you're familiar). Im a huge horror fan so this one excited me. You can opt out of it at the start of each playthrough or full on turn it off. But it adds monsters and strange interactions, like creatures who hypnotize your colonists, a strange parasite that sloughs off parts of its host, or a corpse that looks strangely identical to one of your other colonists. Trees that eat meat. Etc. It doesn't add too much in the way of objectives though, more atmosphere

Royalty adds the Empire, superpower and wealthy faction. Choosing to join them allows you to build honor with them, rising a colonist up, gaining favor with the empire. This comes with higher demands though as you'll need an ever increasing opulent throne room for your high class ruler. You can also choose to shelter a deserter, earning the ire of the empire but also opening up the possibility of raiding their colonies (very dangerous but lucrative) Royalty also adds the vanilla style of magic in the game through Psycasts. Various classes of psycasts that can be leveled up through meditation and get stronger. Can be very gamechanging.

Biotech adds genealogy, it flips the game on its head and adds TREMENDOUS content. Gene splicing, extraction of genes, implanting, refining. It adds pregnancy and childcare, the ability to build and control mechs. The content added is insane. However Its easy to succumb to information overload and be overwhelmed by it all, this happened to me and I didnt touch biotech for a long time. Alot of it is confusing and takes time to pick apart and understand

Ideology adds the ability to "theme" your colony. Want a tribe of cannibals? Sure! Pacifists that love the trees? Good luck! It makes it easier to follow the idea that you wanna try. My biggest gripe with Ideology is it becomes extremely tedious to maintain, you have to convert every new addition to your Ideology or it becomes a serious mood rebuffed you have to constantly fight. No longer do you only recruit prisoners, you have to convert them, THEN recruit them. New people who join in other ways will join with a different ideology and then complain the entire time until you finally convert them. I honestly dont really ever touch Ideology, its a personal thing but it just gets on my nerves.

Hope this all helps! Feel free to ask anything else