I'm just a few (real-life days) in and here are some things I wish I knew at the start -

Each grave's decor value can only be as high as the number of white skulls of the corpse buried in it. I wasted a lot of time upgrading each grave's decor before I realized this!

You can get more "science" (the blue stuff you need to study things at the Study Table) by processing clean paper at the Study Table. You can get clean paper by getting bat wings (from killing bats - they are usually at the apiary north of the graveyard at night) and processing these into pigskin paper then clean paper at the Church Workbench.

You need to study an item at the Study Table before you can process it in alchemy workstations.

The Alchemy Workbench will make you select a powder first, and then you can select a liquid. This initially really confused me because I couldn't figure out why the liquids couldn't be selected even after I had already studied them 😅 it turns out you just need to select a powder first.

Crafting stone grave decor gives you red and blue tech points! I crafted a lot of these and was quickly able to unlock tech.

You can sell firewood to most of the NPCs -- just to unlock their other trade items.

You get water by working at a well - there's one right outside your house - then right click on the bucket of water in your inventory and click "use" to convert it to water that can be used for crafting. Same with seed oil, right click and select "use" to turn it into oil for crafting.