I'm escaping on the found ship, playing on a peaceful tribal start.

My strategy:

• First and foremost - control for RNG by finding a seed with 5 colonists having decent plants skills for self-sustenance via foraging. Otherwise, retires would be too frustrating, and I wanted a lot of them quickly to get a good time. My favorite seed 'trashrng5' worked pretty well here.
• Put auto-save every 14 days and use the mode with loads (commitment allows for maximum 1 day auto-save interval).
• Abandon the home location as quickly as possible without picking up anything.
• Split the caravan into 5 individual ones and move them around. Based on the anecdotal evidence having them in one location increases likelihood of dying from starvation.
• Move caravans to different sides of the map. Avoid cold areas and deserts as much as possible. If unavoidable, pick colonists with best plants skills for the job.
• Wait for the ship to spawn and go there with the closest colonist. Move others away from the roads. I tried to let them join the ride, but anecdotally found 10-15s slowdown in ship launch time several times.
• Rush to the ship and enable its reactor. Rinse and repeat until happy with the time. Then, do a full run waiting for the ship launch.

I re-timed the run by closely watching for visual cues at ¼x speed. The starting dialog disappears right as the timer starts. The reactor readiness message appears at 23:18.85 timer value. This messages generally matches the launch button becoming colored. I was spamming the keyboard shortcut and apparently launched the ship right then.

I show the developer mode and mods being off at the end of the video.

Note: 1.1 and 1.0 have different ship timings. The ship appears later in 1.1, but takes 1 less day to launch. Given a fast passage of time with all settlements abandoned, that results in ~30s advantage for 1.1 with other things equal.

Mod notes: Accurate judgment of launch time failed. Est. error ~4 frames.