Ah man, I too love and am playing Rimworld Ideology right now. Im currently playing a squad of WW1 soldiers trying to caravan across the continent in five years or less, cause if we dont the planet will blow up.
Regarding the sudden death events, almost all are preventable or manageable (except meteorites), but only if you prepare for it well in advance. A lot of their solutions are non-obvious but make sense.
If you want a chill base builder I strongly recommend playing it on Phoebe Chillax at the lowest difficulty. At the default settings with Cassandra, the game is designed to ensure your base will end in disaster because the stated goal of the game is not to be winnable, but to generate stories of ridiculous circumstances. Since you can adjust the difficulty in game, you can always turn up the challenge if you want a threat and turn it back down when you dont. Its the same way my wife plays the game and she loves it. Typically, bases fall apart because theres no breathing room between disasters.