I'm creating another forum thread for discussing B19 Build% strategies. I'll share my thoughts below:

1. I strongly believe mimicking esprs123's strategy in capturing pawns is the best way to start games, even after b19 changed the way recruitment works. You're near guaranteed one pawn within the first days of opening the sleep baskets.

2. In IronOreAgate's run, he developed a pawn to create artwork to sell in order to earn enough money. This might be the best way to go, but im also curious if growing cotton could also be viable.

3. Im curious if it would be worth also purchasing neutroamine to manufacture wake-up, as its the only hard drug pawns can regularly consume without addiction. Wake-up can induce a heart attack on average once every 120 game days, but the game should be over long before that.

4. On the topic of drugs, growing psychite for psychite tea to keep moods up might also be viable, but would require a pawn with high growing levels.

5. For storyteller settings, Cassandra on Peaceful seems best, but I would like to know if Cassandra on Builder could be better for obtaining more pawns and opening up more quest opportunities.

Re: Storyteller settings, note that you are permitted to change the storyteller and difficulty during the run to suit your purposes. For example, if you depend on the game generating a big raid, but you don’t want to deal with mood problems. The least radical setting (in terms of gameplay difficulty) will be used when labeling the submission.

So one could start a game at Peaceful, and then change it to Builder at a later point. The run itself would be labeled as "peaceful"?

No. You get two modes, non-extreme and merciless. So if you start a peaceful game and change to merciless, it would fall under non-extreme. As well as starting merciless and changing to builder, would still be non-extreme.

That makes sense. I have a feeling extreme runs must be pretty long though.

Depends on the situation, extreme modes may swing in your favor with categories like 20 Healthy Prisoners and Neutralise the Ancient Danger as it provides more pawns and better strategies, however other categories like Build% and gold sculpture can hinder you and set you back a couple of hours due to RNG.