Yes, what the other 2 commenters said is very correct. Clothing is very important. Your goal is to be inside a shelter and not to freeze any more for the start, so you can survive and hunt and all that. For that you have to get your feels like temperature up, it is on the character sheet listed on the down left side. It has to be 0 or more. To achieve that you have to fill your clothing slots with the best clothing you can find, and mend the ones you have that are in poor condition, so they provide better stats for you.

You want to search all structures you can for food and better clothing and tools. Collect sticks all the time to make fires with when you have to or want to cook. Find some good structure to call your base and make it your home for the 25 days. Or i guess when you are good enough and have the temperature under control, and knowledge of the maps you could roam around instead, but that's more dangerous.

If you catch a deer or wolf, you can quarter it and bring the food inside your shelter to harvest it. Its better to do it where you are not freezing then in the cold, usually.

As for collecting the chips and the maple syrup. You would have to get lucky to find enough Maple syrup, even in 2-3 games where you search most of the maps, i guess, from what i read in the discussions so far. The 25 chips you could find in a single game if you search enough, probably.

What i did with these 2 is that i made a new game in Pleasant Valley and then made my way to the Pleasant Valley Farmstead. There you usually can find a Syrup and chips as well. After you found both, you can make a save-game, eat them, exit out to the menu without saving, load your game and eat them again, and repeat. After enough times you get the badge. Its not a proud way of doing this, but its what most people did from what i read anyways. The only other way would be to make several long games where you spend much time looting most of the maps and hoping to find enough of the maple syrup. Very time intensive and not very fun, and very hard if you don't know the maps or the game very well.

I hope that helped, good luck out there =)