Press the Escape key a few times as the game launches and you will instantly get into main menu screen! I found this out myself today as I disabled some mods to play with friends.
You also miss out on more time to play the game which is kinda ironic when your name is 'One More Day'
This is not an unknown feature. There is a mod which does this automatically because even hitting escape, or for that matter simply clicking on the screen, does iterate you forward, it still takes a few seconds to do so, and if you are testing mods and booting up constantly after tweaking the code to see if it works, that adds up.
