I started playing at very early alpha and started modding right away. The really cool thing about Ludeon is that virtually every expansive mod (not additional items but gameplay/QoL ect) has been made relatively native in compatibility with each new DLC: space colony, multiple bases, races and limb frameworks, multiplayer, events and quests, special abilities, pawn interactions and relationships. You can see each DLC basically providing a native framework for these mods to play nice and plug into the game without creating all kinds of bugs and hacks to implement.

Vanila with DLCs now has pretty much any feature you want, and mods just ad more content and granularity. I would suggest playing a space colony scenario if you’d like to try sometime new. It feels different enough in the survival aspect and will introduce a bunch of new stuff to explore.