Dull, linear, boooooooooooooring!

Definitely the worst of the DLC.

You can only sustainably produce three resources at home (coal, steel, and steam cores). This seems fine at first, since the mission makes very clear it's a trading-based scenario. But the problem is that there's almost nothing to manage at home and your settlement is completely uninteresting. The way the mission is set up actively discourages you from building infrastructure at home; you need to trade steel to get resources from the other settlements, and you have an option to spend wood to increase steel production, and since you can't produce other resources anyways there's little point in spending wood or steel at home. Even your workshops fall idle as there's nothing worthwhile to tech into. At which point you're just sitting there, passing time until the cooldown on trading expires or you accrue enough resources to complete the next project you're aiming for.

The settlement option in endless mode is somehow even worse. Well, it's not like it makes endless mode worse, it just doesn't really change anything. The first trading settlement (it's always Hot Springs) spawns after the first storm, and the second two spawn after the third storm. The problem is you've already built your infrastructure at home by the time you meet them for the first time, and there's little point in trading when you can already produce the resources more efficiently at home. The trading posts themselves are actually pretty expensive. The only trade post I found useful was with the Convicts, which give you wood and steel in exchange for food and coal. This is nice since wood and steel are essentially bottlenecked on drill sites and mining sites, while coal and food can be produced in unlimited quantities from thumpers and hunters. The other two are pretty useless outside of supplementing yourself through negative events, since they require such massive amounts of wood and steel (not to mention workers) that it's just not sensible to even bother setting up the trade posts with them until you absolutely need it (first time I tried I literally ran out of adult workers at home due to the staffing requirements on upgraded trading posts; my "no child labor" run quickly took an about-face)