I'm going to be running a campaign that's combining Ruins of Azlant and Kingmaker--"establish settlement in uncharted land, then explore outwards", so while I'm not using the overall plot of Ruins, I'm leaning heavily on the non-Aboleth elements.
That said, I enjoy the vanished settlers aspect, and am going to use a much shorter version--more of a "Pied piper monster was awoke and swept everyone away."
Thing is, I want the first colonists to have been there less time than what's written in the adventure--but if I reduce the time, then the amount of building/prep they did would need to be reduced. I don't have a strong sense of how much they could have accomplished in monthly intervals.
It says that they arrived on Ancorato 6 months ago, had been kidnapped 1 month ago, so that gives them 5 months of building progress.
How much could they have gotten done after 4 months? 3? 2? 1?
The reason I want less setup time is because I intend to have local inhabitants who are living a half-day's walk from the settlement, but I want the PCs to be the first contact with them. This is hard as the original colonists and natives would have likely bumped into one another, so to avoid that they'd need to have been too busy with setup to explore much.
