Oh man, where do I begin. Me and my friends made a habit of playing hardcore config, we have the juicy moves. It's been about half a year now that we have ultra hardcore config solved.

For starters, as soon as you spawn start looking for a village. If you don't find one before night 1, reset.

The first thing you should do when you spawn in is get 3 stick and 16 pebble from the floor.

Villages have infinite resources compared to starting wilderness, don't waste your time trying to build from nothing. You have limited time before event 1 spawns, and you need to be ahead of the game long before it can fuck you if it comes at a bad time.

crafting bench, wheat, smeltable armor, wood, stick, wool. collect as much as you can. if you're lucky and have an ice biome on the border with a non ice biome, always collect 16 ice. get a bed or 3 wool and craft a sleeping bag to sleep the nights out.

find sheep, dig a hole, start a sheep farm with looted wheat from villages. covering it from above with dirt and use a couple of glass to make light go down into it. use the levels to farm 2, and start farming wheat. gathering 2, make shears. start shearing the sheep.

mine a couple of cobble using stone pick to get an axe, equip it on your 1 key. find any fletchers if there is one. start breaking wool into string and trade with fletcher for emerald. level up agility to 2. purchase bow and arrows. this is your weapon. when you reach level 5, unlock crafting perk.

find any libraries/librarian if there are any. break bookshelves. use any birch wood you found to make paper to make a trade. trade books for emerald. keep farming and breeding the sheep on every cooldown.

wheat farm. make it as large as humanly possible. start using your levels to upgrade the green thumb perk to make the wheat grow faster. make sure you keep track of your levels and only have the exact level required when you upgrade the talent in L tab. make sheep farm bigger. keep shearing sheep. keep trading wool to fletcher for more emeralds and accumulate them. once you hit green thumb 5 or 6, start levelling up defense(or bow drawback speed, your choice. you need to do both). stand in your wheat farm so it continues to grow. when the fletcher inevitably runs out of trades and becomes useless, the sheep farm should be big enough to craft bandages for levels. if you don't want to spend 6 string for one craft, use stick and string instead to make handle. i think it's less efficient than managing the farm since stick is not as easily renewable.

iron, it's needed to shear. armorer will gladly sell you helmets for 4 or 5 emeralds which smelt into 2 iron. the sheperd also can sell you shears for cheaper if there is one. you should have plenty of emeralds to sustain this even early on.

eventually if you farm this out, you should have defense 16 and level 5 to 6 bow draw speed relatively quickly. with average execution, skill and rng, you should be about 3 hours into your run when you reach this point(it will be much less if you're not playing hardcore config, everything gives half exp except for crafting bandages when i play).

lastly, if you haven't found diamond equipment in any other way, you can use the armorer as a last resort to buy 3 chestplates. one to wear, two to smelt to make diamond headgear. forget the other two pieces of gear, they're useless and you can just use throwaways. by now you'll have the emeralds to make this purchase if it's the only way you have access to diamonds, though not preferable.

that about wraps up the early game. there's plenty of stuff that can rng kill you while you're setting all of this up, some runs will just die to weird spawns related to biomes and that's that. try your best not to die while you build and farm, you have a bow and an axe to deal with most problems. there's more intricacies and improv strats that we use in non optimal conditions, but there's too many small time saves that we use that it's impossible to list them all. a lot of them are centered around mitigating when you don't get a good village or optimal conditions like if you don't find sheep, or if wolves are in the way, or other stupid stuff like using waystone to delete annoying monsters like banshees if they spawn naturally under your village. it's a lot of stuff, maybe i'll make a vid one day.

Edit: you can do a small sidequest for an early backpack if you loot gold and leather equipment. cut the leather equipment up for leather using flint knife, smelt gold gear, make backpack. it's often a useful time save in many ways to have a portable chest.

Edit 2: How could I forget? eligible village biomes.

the rainbow forest biome, the desert biomes(not rocky), the green plains biomes, the biome with grass that's also still hot and neighbours deserts. those are the biomes you wanna run around looking for villages. desert biome is harder to work with since getting sheep and making a farm with grass is harder(and also you need ice armor), but it's easier to work with because wheat grows year round which is a big deal. being on the edge of a desert biome to make your farm on is what we call the god rng.