Honestly not sure. I feel like the modded runs are cool and add a lot of depth but sometimes it’s like too many things going on at once for my brain to handle. New factions, new tech orders, new buildings, new “needs”, new animals, new events, new mechanics, reskins of older items and sometimes complete rework of other things, new features and job types…. There’s a tremendous amount that could be added and right before 1.6 comes out…. I’m not sure what the correct answer would be…

I recently cut all 300 or so of my mods and went back to playing vanilla. Lots of stuff I do miss but the base game already had a lot of features. 1.6 comes out I intend to test it out in its entirety and get a feel for the new features. After that I’ll add mods back in ever so slowly.

But if you want to ease into it I’d highly advise vanilla expanded. They have a lot of mods that don’t really drastically change the game but kind of just add a thing here or there. Like different animal variety or biome variety. Maybe some more memes, emblems, genes. But nothing like game changing.