I got 1704 people before I decided to stop and finally get around to playing Skyward Collapse.
Some way to destroy water tiles besides just letting them get attacked would be nice. To not make it too easy maybe if you unconnect 1-3 tiles from rest of the land(by building and then deconstructing around them) they'd collapse by themselves.
Overtime I noticed that amount of wood spawned was always too little but I suppose you are meant to use apple trees for that but in a large settlement they seem like too much trouble, auto harvester getting the wood from depleted apple trees might help with that.