So I'm currently playing my first game, and was feeling pretty good right at the start. The longer it went on though, the more lost I started feeling. Feel like I just hit the information overload wall and not really sure what to do from here.

On my first game ever, and I went with Fanatic Pacifist and Xenophile. So far I haven't been thrown into any wars, and for the most part I'm on good terms with all the other empires. Was hoping to open up migration with them, but so far they either don't approve enough, or I don't have matching worlds for them.

I have no clue whether or not I'm expanding enough. Luckily I went with Wormhole FTL, or I would have been blocked in pretty quickly. I tried to scout as much as possible early on, mostly being bottlenecked by how many wormhole stations I could build. I tried grabbing decent planets early that weren't super close, just to try and establish some borders before anything else showed up (was only able to grab continental, ocean, and tropical planets, with the latter two being 60% ones for me). I'm blocked in now though. I have one other direction to start scouting in, and there's some planets south of the other empires, but I'm afraid I'm getting to a point where anything I could grab would be pretty cut off from the rest of my empire. Should I start grabbing not-crap planets inside my own borders now? Am I expanding too much too early? When do I stop trying to colonize more planets? Hell, I haven't even gotten to sectors yet, I'm having a hard enough time once I get to 5-6 planets as it is right now.

Kind of stuck on what buildings I should be putting on each planet as well. I tried to stay around even on food, but that's as much as I was able to really do. The rest I was mostly just winging it on with no plan. Hell, even the food I was doing that with, they're pretty spread out across all my planets right now. Should I be specializing planets? What's some good advice here?

I have some screenshots of where my game is currently at, and can give more details on what I've done so far if I need to. Any help would be huge. I don't even know if playing pacifist was a good idea or not for a new player. If it helps, I do own Leviathan and Utopia, so all features are available for me.

This was a 4 Spiral, random empire start game. https://imgur.com/a/cKqhg