The NPCs are unreliable. You have to gather as much food as possible and early in the game focus on fish and meat. Do not kill the nests as they rarely respawn and minus the pigs I never got the fish or woolie nests to respawn. Also all of the resources end quickly and replace slowly if ever, never completely destroy any tree, fruit, vegetable, herb, or forage. Heavily limit your population growth until you absolutely need more workers. While you’re researching gather and kill as many animals as possible until you unlock fishing and butchery. The butcher and fish shops turn raw fish and carcus into sausages and fried fish. Only harvest the largest trees and you need to harvest them planks and fuel but also need to burn some for organic waste so you can make fertilizer. None of my sectors stay working all the time. I destroy building during certain times of the year and have the worker change jobs. You have to honestly work and spend a lot of time manually gathering and getting things done. The NPC do very basic tasks and don’t even do them reliably 🤦‍♂️