I’ve been playing this game for almost a decade now, and still have to look stuff up sometimes when I forget about it (generally after months mostly idling before resetting.) The wiki is helpful, but as you said doesn’t really explain things so I mostly use reddit. I also sometimes have to go to the old wiki to find things, they might be on the new one but I am a curmudgeon and have trouble getting used to it.

Yep, that’s what I found out. However I think it would have been better without HG at the beginning due to rounding down housing sometimes and the anarchy challenge. I had to sit at 1 hut for a while, since buying the 2nd and 3rd huts didn’t give enough workers to sustain themselves farming. At the fourth hut I finally had 3 workers, which were able to sustain the non working kittens if all 3 were farming. Then I was able to let it sit and build up a catnip store before switching one to woodcutting, running negative on catnip, until I got too low and switching it back. I think with HG off I could have started to do that with the 2nd or 3rd hut. Due to rounding there was always a time that I would get a non working kitten without a paired working kitten due to anarchy. But after that initial part I started getting pastures and it started to not matter anymore. It was fun to go back to actually worrying about catnip for the first time in years.

Apparently I just needed to make this post to finally find what I was missing, it was Holy Genocide. Tested turning it off, but now that I am past the initial hump it is better to have it on, so just leaving it for now. It made the beginning of this game with the three challenges take quite a while, I had to build up a ton of catnip fields and run with just one hut/farmer for a while to build up a catnip store. Then after a few huts I had to balance 3 working cats, switching one of them occasionally to wood while watching the catnip plummet. Probably all things that happen in a completely new game, but it’s been 8 years since I’ve been at that point. Pretty fun.