Well I'm enjoying it for now. Still using a watch tower to defend on horde nights but I've torn down the last remnants of my starter house in favor of a concrete bunker with two above ground levels and a small farm on the roof, and I've started wiring it up for lighting. Not quite ready to try defending it on horde nights since failing would be game over unless I cheese it by moving my bedroll to the watch tower first, but I think it's probably good enough.
Holy shit the auger, chainsaw, and especially the minibike are completely insane. Managed to scavenge a high quality engine for the minibike and it absolutely zips along, it's an absolute game changer in terms of being able to easily get back to your base on distant scavenging trips instead of having to hole up somewhere for the night, and it's nice to have the extra storage space for stuff like hot/cold weather clothing. The gas-powered tools are crazy, I dug a desert mine and after sending the initial shaft deep enough I went sideways with the auger and ended up with almost two full stacks of oil shale, so now I basically have infinite gas. What's particularly amazing about the chainsaw is not needing stamina on top of being so fast, so I can sprint from tree to tree and never have to stop. Went from periodically having to go out and replenish my wood to having 3 full stacks banked.
Still a fair number of schematics I'm missing, I assume since I've mostly kept the indoor scavenging to a minimum so far, so that will probably be the next step for me. Kinda got my eye on the police station in the plains, although I've read that zombie cops are super dangerous. I may do a mine in the wasteland first to dig for a nitrate vein and the same in either the burnt or snowy forest for coal, so I have a good reserve of gunpowder. My only grievous loss so far was my first death when I killed myself with TNT popping open the bank vault in Perishton. Didn't quite understand how how you set off TNT because I was misreading the description, so it took my second experimental death back near my base before it dawned on me that damaging it doesn't light the fuse, it sets it off. All the debris from the explosion destroyed my backpack and while I was able to quickly rebuild all the tools I lost, I still haven't seen another set of NVGs at a trader and those things were amazing.
World really is fucking huge when you're just dicking around in single player.