Need Help: Tundra Planet Survival

[Quasarrgames]

Hello!

I've been away from this game for a long time (since alpha 12 i think), but i still remember how to play it. Wanting to do something challenging, i landed my colonists on a hilly tundra on roughly the equator of an ice planet, one with the lowest temperature and rainfall settings.

It appears as though many things have been rebalanced, because i've tried four separate colonies and all of them have basically failed.
In the first one i ran out of food.
In the second one i concentrated more on food, and things seemed to be going fine, until everyone went crazy right before a raid and the colony was overrun.
In the third one i concentrated more on boosting peoples' happiness from the start by building individual bedrooms and a table, but i made the switch to hydroponics too early, and the food and power shortages that followed made everyone crazy.
The fourth one is almost dead as well, as one of my colonists started a fire and burnt about a third of the food, so we'll run out before the first rice crop can be harvested.

So i'm having problems balancing keeping people fed and keeping them sane. If i focus on a greenhouse from day one, people start breaking by first harvest. If i make bedrooms or a table, people run out of food before harvest and go crazy anyways.

TD;LR What's the best way to give colonists an easy mood boost, or optimize food production indoors early on?

Thanks!

[Shurp]

Easy mood boost: plant smokeweed, craft joints at a crafting spot.  But it takes time to get your farms going, so you have to keep your colony sane prior to that.  Separate bedrooms and a horseshoe pin will help.  Also don't forget to set everyone to "joy" on the restrictions tab so they spend lots of time looking at the stars and staying happy instead of doing useful work

Easy food: go hunting.  Kill everything on the map at the start, stick it in the freezer, and you'll be good for a while.

Hydroponics: don't bother.  You're in *tundra*.  That's good soil there if you just melt it.  So build a greenhouse.  That's a room with a roof, a sunlamp, and a heater, and plants stuck straight in the dirt underneath.

[yawningrover]

if you can try EPOE for frostbite if need be. also try out vegetable garden because they have better hydroponics and fertilizer so you can use the green house idea inside of mountains by placing dirt and fertilizing. but that's only if you want mods