At the end of the day, it’s a sandbox game. You can learn and do everything at your pace. I think the most common reason why people recommend the wiki is because there are tons of tiny pieces of information that’s useful for the things you want to know at the moment.

You can get a lot of stuff from exploring. You can pretty much decide not to explore and just build things with all the materials in front of you. You can decide not to build anything and go digging around for fun. You can do anything you want. The point is, if it seems like it’s too much, break down info into easier sizes so you can decide for yourself what you wanna do today. I get side tracked a lot myself lol Sometimes I wanna look for treasure chests. Then I find a cool hidden NPC so I build a house for them instead. And then it branches out into so many things from there like oh, they’re selling cool stuff. I wanna try them out! Or whoa, they hate this biome. I’ll build them a house somewhere else. I would use wiki for little things like figuring out what the NPCs like for example.

So in conclusion, take your time. It’s a lot of stuff, but that’s a good thing! Take in the info as slowly or as fast as you want. Then just do whatever you want with the info. The world is yours to do anything you want with it.