MadMaxHellfire Don't even cruise mods yet. Just play the vanilla game and make sure you have permadeath on like you're supposed to.
As you play, think about things that annoy you, like "it's weird that a storage cabinet can only hold two weapons, that's causing problems it shouldn't", or "but why can't my colonists wear clown costumes?"
This will be different for every player so it's fucking stupid to expect somebody to tell you "one true list" of perfect mods. Make a list of the things
you want to change about the game. (Note, you may not want to change anything, this doesn't make you a bad person.)
When your first colony gets wiped out, and it will,
then look up a few mods to make the game more like you want and start your next colony.
EDIT: I have hundreds of hours in the game and the only mod I really like is
Locks, because some of my colonists don't want everybody and their dog tracking mud and hair all over their bedroom. Sometimes I like to use
EdB Prepare Carefully when I want to tell
a specific story. Recently I added
[SYR] Set Up Camp because I find caravanning extremely annoying, but I haven't tried it yet. And today I added
RimWriter because a colony library sounds cool. That's it, those are the 4 mods I have subbed.