u/Admirable-Ad3293

I'm still muddling my way through my first playthrough. I'm at the point now where I'm gradually upgrading most of my vehicles to tier 2 so I can free some up for other jobs.

My issue at this point is after fixing my iron throughput, my wood sustainability, power generation, worker population, and coal mines, I am now generating just enough pollution that every time a simple cold runs through my settlement, 50-100 people just drop dead instantly as global health plummets from like 6-12 down to -2 - -8. This in turn forces me to halt diesel production and occasionally to kneecap my steelmill and iron foundry by pausing portions of those too.

I have glass online obviously, I am 90% of the way to getting paper online. So science 2 is imminent, but I'm concerned I'm not gonna make it to exhaust scrubbing and thermal desalination before some health crisis kills literally everyone.

Is there any way to really manage population health before you unlock clinics SUPER late in the game? Like other than food variety and micromanaging refinery outputs?

I have been playing and kind of figuring out things by the encyclopedia and by trial and error, occasionally I refer to the wiki to discover things like "vehicle parts 2 have to be unlocked via exploration."

At this stage I have built my first small coal power plant, I have 4 x 4 diesel distillation but still haven't managed the sour water yet (I tried dumping it and everybody died), and I don't have a consistent way of managing light oil because relying on it exclusively for my power plant drains it way faster than the distiller seems to generate it.

I have been leaning HARD on my starter concrete kilns and singular iron foundry which I've kind of finally reached the threshold for them being insufficient and needing to rebuild them closer to the actual iron deposit and scale up. I have not yet started making construction 3. I have unlocked the second island to trade with, and I do have the first tier of guns/armor on my boat. I have a small-ish biodiesel operation going but that's very intermittent and mainly just a thing I turn on when my crops are getting too full.

I experienced a groundwater depletion that forced me to reload an earlier save to escape an ensuing death spiral, so currently near-built project is 6 rainwater catchers and 8 distillers fed by 16 seawater pumps to ensure a supply of water I don't have to babysit QUITE so much.

I have heavy vehicles unlocked but from what I understand it will be a WHILE before I can actually build and utilize them, so I'm not sure if my rush to get those online is something to continue pursuing or if I should just lean on swarms of the smaller vehicles and let the big ones come as they come.

My current docket of "I need to work on this next" projects is:

1. Proper concrete making, building out slag crushers and kilns and probably a handful of new mines

2. Scale up iron output and move my iron foundry out of the middle of town and somewhere it's closer to the ore and has room to expand

3. Ditto copper

4. Only once I've scaled up iron, I can I then begin working on a steel foundry.

5. Once steel and construction 3 is online, I will need to build out a sour water management solution. I need to decide if I want to just build a second, smaller power plant here to burn off excess light oil or if I just flare it.

This is roughly where I'm at, and I keep finding that crises are starting to crop up at a much more frequent rate, though more from my neglecting this or that aspect than from being genuinely overwhelmed.

So I was hoping for some input from more experienced players on what I should be keeping an eye on, what I should maybe prioritize and what doesn't actually make the kind of difference I'm imagining. Things I'm going to wish I had already planned on scaling up and building out at this stage rather than in another 5 hours.