Well got through quite a bit of the beginning of DDSS
Hardest part is tin. Lots of iron, tons of copper. Not much in the way of tin, but at least I've found some.
Found a dragon's lair on the surface. So I cheesed it by building a stone bunker. but then it flew off behind a hill, so I looted everything (so much gold nuggets that can turn into gold bars. And a bunch of other good stuff). Then it came back and I spent a real life hour (okay maybe it was 30 minutes, but felt like a while lol) beating it down with stone aiots as I hid in my bunker (well did use two iron swords I found) and finally finished it off with a bow and some arrows. One hp at a time
And it had lots of hp. Was a male so no egg, but got dragon blood, dragon meat, scales and bones. Can't use any of it, but it felt like a stoneage caveman slowly taking on a dragon lol. It did destroy blocks, but I had a ton of stone so wasnt a big deal.
Then I built a very long road to the lair. The dragon won't respawn, but it will make it easier to get in that general direction. Otherwise had to go over or around a mountain, past a swamp and then past a thick forest. Took an hour to build the road.
But managed to make the blacksmith workshop and get it running. It requires methane to use (early on it uses methane, I think it uses other gas too). Making the blacksmith workshop was pretty involved, but process of getting methane was pretty intense. There is a questline to get you running though, and when you finish it requires (lots) of compost to make humus which then gets extracted in a machine, then pumped to a tank or straight to the blacksmith workshop. Its pretty manual to make the humus, and gotta replace it pretty often. But the blacksmith workshop doesn't use much of it luckily (so far).
Then because I had the blacksmith workshop running, I was able to make a very resource intensive sprinkler. Felt rewarding once made though, was pretty fun process. Since think I'm gonna go down the magical agriculture path instead of the more tech stuff for now. And the magical plants take ages to grow (someone in discord said they waited 1-2 hours and theirs hadn't grown yet), so either need a sprinkler or a boring manual method of a watering can. Luckily I had all the resources available to make the sprinkler (barely though) and got methane going. Including the two gold plates (4 gold ingots total) to make it. If the dragon lair hadn't generated near my base, I'd never been able to make it lol. Sprinkler makes a huge difference in the magical plant growth, its pretty much required. Unless you don't mind pouring water on them...over and over and over lol.