Uses the same 1 minute tutorial from the demo, doesn't explain anything that needs to be explained.
Spent all day yesterday working on a very small, modest town, completely overbuilt, and then it gives me a 9 day drought and literally everyone dies because obviously. The way you control population is stop building housing, how is that fun? But then you won't have enough beavers to man enough pumps for absurd droughts.

If you play for an hour or two, all is fine and cozy. But you have no warning of how long droughts will be, just that a drought is coming in 3 days, usually that lasts for 3 days. But then I get a 9 day drought and waste my entire day (again)? I'm not save scumming a city builder. I knew I was dead the second it said the drought was 9 days.

Just leaving this here since apparently I'm the only person capable of having an opinion other than 'this game is the best thing ever'.

Good that you express your opinion, I hope the devs read and other potential buyers so that they can form an opinion if they should buy or not.

This is my opinions:

I have played on medium difficulty three times (two as the "regular" beavers and once as the iron teeth) and the first couple of droughts have never been more then two days. If you had that it sounds like a bug. Again, I haven't played on the hard difficulty.

The tutorial is very short yes. I didn't need it. The game is very standard for these kind of games. But not everybody has played these kind of games before so for them the tutorial must be very lacking. I understand that criticism.

I like the way you handle population. Very simple. Compare it to a game like Banished (which I really liked) where it was and is very buggy and unfun. The whole town dies if you don't have enough population.
If you unlock the Iron Teeth also they don't reproduce the same way. They must build tanks that make new beavers. So that is personal opinion if you like it or not. This game is easier then banished in many ways and you can create a custom game and get rid of droughts altogether.

I think this game is much better then most other city-builders similar to it. It might be somewhat lacking in content. It's not a massive amount at the moment but what it here is great. In my opinion of course.

Hope it clicks for you soon and you start to enjoy it, otherwise dump the game and play something else. All games aren't for everyone.

This I don't really get; if you like what you've built so far why not just load a save early enough to prepare? Currently the game does not remove autosaves so you should be able to pick up at the best time to prepare without a lot of wasted effort if you didn't save recently (unless you turned off autosaves). I think the randomization does happen at the time of the drought so you could get a shorter one.

From looking at the custom settings, there is an initial period with a set percentage reduction of the usual drought duration; it would be helpful if the game let you know how long that is in particular settings, or at least gave you stronger warnings that they will get worse at some point. There is a feature request to show the settings for preset difficulty levels. My impression is that on normal the reduction is only for 4 or 5 cycles so if you are unlucky you could get the 9 day drought fairly early. I think after the initial period the range might be 5 to 9 days.

The developers do seem to have a "let players figure out how things work as they go along" philosophy that doesn't really go well with a "no save scumming" philosophy. The point of the drought mechanic is to encourage you to build dams and floodgates to keep enough water available. If you do that you don't need a lot of pumps for a small population since they can continue working through the drought. I usually don't like how builders add difficulty but this one seems reasonable to me.

One other negative to mention is the lack of custom key bindings at this point (feature request). The game also doesn't currently follow the OS swap buttons setting that some lefties use (bug report).

I started on Hard difficulty and it took several iterations before I got the balance right. You have to build small increments and always have surplus of resources for as long as possible. Focus workers dynamically, don't be afraid to overdrive and eventually the settlement starts sprawling.
Really enjoying the whole idea about sustainability and non-violence.