So I finally got together with some friends to play Core Keeper just ahead of the 1.0 launch! One of them is speedrunning while the rest of us are going in relatively blind, and Cavelings hit pretty hard right now. At one point I offered to go caving with one of them to try and find some tin, and then an army spawned on us.
At that moment my fight or flight instincts took over which included using the sandbox part of the sandbox game, but it presented a problem: I forgot I had a caving buddy and I got them killed as a result