So I bought a bundle of Offworld Trading Company and a couple of DLCs on Steam (basically just Io). I assumed, more fool me, that the DLCs would be additive: that you could turn them on and off as you wish, leaving just the base game. But this appears not to be true: there is no in-game interface to enable/disable DLCs, disabling the Io DLC in the Steam UI has no effect, the DLC appears to be nailed into the guts of the game so you can't move it out of the way from the command line... and it appears that having it active changes both the intro and the tutorial to something that frankly (as a new player) makes very little sense if you haven't already played the base game (honestly the intro video appears to assume you have *completed* it).
Is there any way at all to turn this sort of major expansion pack DLC off for a while? I suspect not: the Steam forum has a bunch of unanswered complaints from people who bought the full bundle of all the DLCs and are now overwhelmed with complexity from the very start: complexity there is no obvious way to remove. If so, this seems like a rather serious misfeature, since it actively discourages new players from buying downloadable content! At the very least the steam store page (and other store pages) for the game should warn about this to stop people torpedoing themselves by buying the lot at once, since with most games doing that sort of thing in a sale is generally a good idea.
(My next attempt will be uninstalling the game and reinstalling it with the DLC unchecked at install time, but having to do that is *ridiculous*. Also I can't do it for nearly a month, since I'm keeping my Steam Deck offline for now since games consoles and rural satellite internet are not terribly compatible
).