Daquavious

optitime, carryon, accessibility tweaks, player corpse, and farseer are some "essential" (imo) quality of life mods. since you're asking for lightly modded vanilla+, for combat i'd take a look at the combat overhaul series of mods. for food, there's a culinary artillery, expanded foods, long-term food, and wild farming, these four greatly expand your options in a way that feels very realistic and natural to the game. also there's hydrate or diedrate and slowtox, adds the need for water and makes get drunk more realistic respectively. if you want full realism there's stone quarry, immersive mining, and immersive woodworking/logging expanded (warning, doing anything will take SO long with these mods but it's def more realistic). also you'll prob want some kinda terrain gen mod, vanilla terrain kinda blows pretty hard. i used to use a combo of terra prety+algernon's watersheds for a while but lately i've been trying terrafirmastory and tbh it's my fav terrain gen so far, can't recommend it more. some visual/misc mods; footprints and bloodtrails (self explanatory), betterer prospecting, (adds more features to propick and removes the RNG, kinda feels cheaty at times tho) heraldry series, night-sky delights, tabletop games (great for multiplayer), temporal symphony. mod managers are not necessary at all really. if you want separate modlists you can just install or copy/paste a separate instance of the game. also very important, it says not to put mods in the "1.22.3\mods" folder but i do it anyways, and have had no issues doing that for years. i have more issues if i put mods in the "roaming\vintagestorydata\mods" folder ngl.