I've had some colonies last 30 hours and some last 30 minutes (not exaggerating). The goal for every game you start is to build a starship to leave the planet. That being said, there are mods that change the win condition to other things but for the base game it's just survive and leave which is far easier said than done. There's different scenarios to choose from for how you start out and once you've chosen your starting scenario you choose your storyteller. The storyteller is basically the difficulty but that can be changed at any time. There's also the choice for only saving upon quitting or save/load anytime. After that you then decide where on the planet you want to crash land or start. Different areas have different challenges so you can really tailor it to be completely different every time (plus the world uses seeds to randomize the world gen). Lastly, you'll pick your pawns that you're starting with and all of their attributes are random. You can reroll them to get a decent starting party or just roll with what the game gives you and see what happens.
Sterile tiles cost silver, so be aware of that. Hospitals, kitchens, and prisoner rooms usually benefit the most from sterile tiles as pawns (unmodded) actually have priority when they are cleaning. Carpets and smoothed stone are generally best for bedrooms and prisons (if you don't want to waste the silver on prisoners).
It's set by default to auto. You have to uncheck that which it sounds like you already did. There's a few things I always keep at 1 but if you keep too much at 1, you'll never get your place clean. At first it's difficult to micro-manage everyone but after you get two or three recruits, you can designate one person to be the hauler/cleaner and once your home/town is clean, you can start them on another project. I tend to raise animals that can haul ASAP since it allows my pawns to never worry about hauling anything when I go mining or cutting down vast swaths of trees. The only issue I've found with animals is that you need to set a proper zone and basically restrict their movement from important places (bedrooms, kitchens, hospitals, freezer, etc.) which will drastically cut down on filth. Grazing animals are usually kept in a shelter I can dig out of a mountain and restrict their movement to everywhere but inside my town (unless I get raided, then I have a zone exact opposite of their normal zone which tells them to only go inside my walls). Also when zoning off animal areas, make sure you are not allowing them to walk over your traps and keep them well away from turrets since the turrets don't care who is in the line of fire.
I take it you never played with Randy Random as a storyteller. Tried him a few times and the last one I had a really great colony going, then had a pawn crash land on the other side of the map and just as I reached him with my two best pawns... nuclear fallout.
'random' to me isn't difficult, it's just arbitrary events, some of which are game-ruiners. I'd prefer a difficulty that just amped up the everything, like +20% to everything enemies, -20% to my dudes, or whatever. Or more frequent raids from better equipped raiders... was a little silly to see a raiding party of like four dudes with knives and pistols attacking my base of 12 colonists and 25 timber wolves. I also wish the raids were just harder.. even a moderately equipped defensive force can take on double their number just through superior positioning and a dash of tactics.
Takes getting used to. Most of the common stuff becomes muscle memory, or you make macros for it if you're really dedicated
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