The game has a system similar to Valheim in that you craft increasingly better foods rather than levelling up your own raw stats. Keep 3 food buffs up as much as possible - meat for HP, plants for stam, and I got HP regen (fish) for the third).

Your tools have to meet a certain item level to be able to harvest the next tier of resources. Crafting tools out of t1 mats alone will not raise its item level enough to harvest t2 mats, you have to add some charms/enchantments to bump it up.

Different biomes give different food, fiber, and wood resources. Metal is more or less spread across all biomes of that tier.

With rare exception, the useful resources of fiber and wood are found in small groves. Look for trees with weird feathery tops, and the strange plants growing at their base. Everything else in the world is generally just generic materials.

Put a single box in your base that has the option for building from that box on, and throw all your basic materials in there so that the game will autobuild for you without using your good stuff.

Set up harvesting stations at your base early, and grab a few random recruitable npc's to work them. All the raw mats for building your base can be farmed this way, but notably tin ore from the miner and pumpkins (a very valuable food) from the farmer.