My toughest challenge yet - hardcore masochist modpack/settings combo

I've been playing this game forever, and I started to feel like the tension of the early days is gone. Whatever settings I picked, I had a fairly stacked base in a couple of weeks, and the game changed from being forced to do missions to get stuff I need, to make random missions to get stuff I want. Decorations, sports cars, whatever. And that just wouldn't do.

To tackle it, I created a PZ settings/mod combo that is pretty challenging, relatively realistic, and is ultimately doable (I think), but only just. My goal was to make something that is relentless early on, but also keeps you on your toes much longer than the regular game. I've been testing it for a few days now, it's certainly not easy. Currently on day 7 with this latest combo, and in pretty rough shape to be honest, but I had fairly poor luck in this run and I'm still kicking, so I might have finally found the balance I was looking for.

I posted the pack of mods on steam as a collection, it's called Sustainability Struggle, this is the link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2875989299

As for the settings and the character traits, I made a bunch of screenshots and added them to my steam profile (I'm sharpbyte41 on steam), here's the link to that: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198899847316/screenshots/

Please note that there are 2 mods that aren't in the collection, they can't be added to modpacks, so you have to add them manually. These are planetalgol's even worse looting mod and also his Worse vehicle condition mod.

I wanted to limit the player's ability to easily clear the surroundings of their base, the Please, Don't Feed the Zombies mod really helps with that, you gotta get rid of the bodies or massive hordes will show up in your backyard.

Another important aspect was to limit loot in general, the Ridiculously Rare Even Worse mod does that very well, but to make sure water stays an issue long term, I'm also using the Water Goes Bad mod (water is slowly draining from the sinks), and for food, I made farming and foraging as difficult as possible in the settings. Mind you, the herbalist trait would still help massively, so I suggest NOT taking it, as a matter of fact, for the extra challenge I personally took Underweight, Hearty Appetite, Weak Stomach and High Thirst as well.

I'm using a bunch of mods and settings to make sure cars are mostly ruined and missing parts, set survivor vehicle spawn to the lowest, but you can still find some occasionally, so to make the challenge hard, I suggest NOT taking burglar either. As a matter of fact, I wanted to make first aid and the Doctor profession useful, so I also added the Zombie Virus Vaccine mod - I've seen how it works in some YT playthroughs, and it looks quite complex and surprisingly balanced. (I was actually thinking about making a custom mod to also start the player with a bite that will turn them in 6 months unless they can manufacture and take the cure, but I'm not gonna have the time for that due to a new job IRL.)

Finally, in my final tests I had no errors, no compatibility issues, everything looked fine, but obviously I can't be sure at this point if every mod works as advertised. It's certainly bloody difficult, if you are looking for a challenge you'll find it. It is so difficult in fact that I ended up toning it down. I took the population down from 8x to 4x, and voted (hell) no on sprinters. They're as smart as they can be though with max vision and hearing.

Now that I think of it, there are a bunch of mods I haven't even mentioned, like realistic inventory (you can carry anything in your backpack, but the main inventory is very limited), or the A_looting sucks mod (looting zombies makes you unhappy, carrying "tainted" loot makes you even more unhappy, if you are severely depressed you can't loot zombies at all...), so I had to balance it with some QoL stuff that just makes sense, hence the Scrap Armor/Weapons mods and the like. I also enabled the default starting kit, so you spawn with a school bag, water bottle, chips, hammer and a baseball bat. I still died a bunch on day one...

Good Luck!