Droplet not retaining settings and pre-existing user groups

I’m having a nightmare starting a fresh new droplet; First, an issue with the locale. LANGUAGE and LC_ALL are always unset -> no problem, followed the several possible online solutions including: export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 etc, reconfigured the locales, run locale and see:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Great, restart, and I’m back to square 1; they are lost again. I tried several other solutions, they either do not work (i.e. language and lc_all remain unset) or upon restart I lose them again.

Issue 2: when I try to add a new user (e.g. admin) I get the error that the group already exists. I’ve created an admin user group before in another droplet and had no issues yet on a fresh droplet, says it exists?

I’ve tried creating a new droplet several times now with no luck specifically (or rather at this stage) to these 2 issues. (Hope I’m not billed for each droplet I created and destroyed - would cost me a fortune)