.oThis was not an auspicious start to a deathworld game: crashed into a dense forest, it caught fire and burned. a lot. a whole lot. enough to stir up the biters, in fact. possibly thanks to rampant, they then came and made me regret my sudden lack-of-life choices.

I'm not sure that "no fires" is a good starting point, but "all the fires" feels pretty painful right now too, since I can't do anything at scale enough to put them out before they pollute enough to trigger that.

I don't know what the answer is, but one idea that springs to mind is:

Count the number of trees near the crash site. If they are greater than a certain count, blow them up like a grenade before dropping in the burning wreckage. That way fires are ... better contained, at least most of the time, because they happen in sparse forests, while dense forests are not magically immune or anything.

Snapshot courtesy reload and cheat, this is actually a very, very short time into the game:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/231518135231053825/606276473145262102/unknown.png

So I did a little bit of testing with deathworld preset and maxed out tree coverage. This resulted in 3 or 4 world-ending forest fires and a huge amount of pollution being generated. I observed biter bases observing the pollution and spawning their maximum number of allowed biters, for a total of somewhere in the range of 500-1000 biters spawned. Since this is all "neutral" pollution, evolution is still at 0% and all the biters are small-biters.

What's interesting is that none of the biters actually attacked, because the player wasn't in range, and the source of the pollution wasn't a player structure. So there's actually plenty of time to use the advantages of Salvage Quickstart to research automation, turrets, and military and build a bunch of turrets. You'll have plenty of iron for ammo and turrets, and you'll need them, because the first few waves will be big from all the accumulated pollution. Honestly, a deathworld player should be doing this already, so I feel like it's working as designed in vanilla.

Rampant is probably making life a lot harder because it initiates attack waves based on time even without player provocation, and the extra pollution means those waves can be very large indeed. I'll have to test more with Rampant, and maybe suggest some settings in the Salvage Quickstart documentation. The recommendation might be just to not install Rampant until you've got yourself an established defensive perimeter.