Survival is a mode with food, water, disease, sleep, save-on-sleep (no save scumming), harder combat, reduced carry weight and a couple more bits. It's good, but I'd recommend waiting until patch 1.6 to start, as it adds an automatic save on exit that is deleted once you load it, in case of crashes. Elsewise, survival is the best way to play Fallout 4 as it makes the game more challenging at lower levels.

Elsewise?

-Get charisma to 6 as soon as possible so you can get the local leader perk and craft weapon modding benches, armour workbenches and so forth
-take everything you see. Even if you're not interested in making crazy city settlements, you'll always need junk for modifying weapons
-you can be a part of each faction simultaeneously. Do a bunch of each faction's side quests and main quests before choosing one or the other so you can get all the cool toys.
-Regardless of your status with the Brotherhood, Railroad and Institute, the Minutemen will always be your friends
-Give settlements a go. They're a massive part of the game and if you like minecraft, then you'll lile settlements. They're even more essential on Survival as no fast travel means you need every opportunity you have to use a bed, get resources or modify your equipment.
-the lone wanderer perk can be used while dogmeat is a companion. The first two ranks add a total of 75 to your carry weight
-Fusion cores are fairly common and you'll soon have dozens of them for using your power armour.

As for mods, here are some of my personal favourites.
-Darker nights
-Seph's Brutality overhaul (makes humans squisher but makes robots and mutants much much tougher. More realistic damage in survival in other words)
-No Guns Allowed (makes weapons and ammo pretty scarce so you actually have a reason to use melee weapons)
-Unleveled Wasteland (Makes it so level 80 enemies can spawn at Level 1 and vice versa. Really fun. Also means you can get high level weapons at a low level to offset this)
-No God Rays and No Lens Flare (improves performance by removing som fancy lighting. Only really important if you're on console as it drops below 30 pretty frequently)

As well as the two mods incan listed.

Overall the mods I have are designed to make the game generally more challenging. Though for your first playthrough I'd experience the game vanilla so you can get a feel for it and decide what you enjoy.

For your first playthrough ONLY get mods that may change certain mechanics and DON'T affect gameplay. Such as a cheat room or new weapon. But a mod that adds in more grass is fine. Or the mod that makes it easier to make choices on what your character will say, that is something you NEED.

Other than that? Have at it.