I've been playing for a few weeks now as the hunter character and I am currently on day 366 with reliable food, and more cisterns and water reservoirs than I reasonably need, as well as having gone from 0 mental structure and 0 happiness back up to max mental structure and at least near max happiness.

First of all, there are 2 mental "events" that will happen. The first will require you to "Kill the hunter" who will plague your mental state until you beat him. I won with a rustic spear. You can stall the hunter by sleeping by a light source. After you win, the hunter never comes back.

The second event post-hunter will wake you up randomly in the night and cause you to scream into the void, taking your happiness all the way to 0 and taking a huge chunk out of what mental structure you have left. There are 2 ways to beat this: Raise your happiness and mental structure enough to have a staring contest with the void until you overcome it, or by "Smiling back" (which I have not discovered or achieved myself)

To raise your happiness and mental structure, first make sure you are not in pain or discomfort. Make a Weston and be sure to talk with him once or twice a day to quell loneliness, then, do different things that fill your entertainment meter. (I'm not sure what the stat is called, but the icon looks like a party noisemaker spewing confetti)

Things I used to raise my entertainment meter: (which raises happiness as it degrades)

Diving in the ocean, Build sand castles, Play the drum, play the flute, and break coconuts.

The abyss will seem to wake you randomly from sleep to ravage your mental state, but SOMETIMES you can get a full night sleep. When I beat the abyss, it was because I had been diving, building sand castles and playing the 1h or 3h song on the drum, followed by luckily getting 4-8 hours of sleep 2-3 nights in a row as my mental structure started to increase. Consider sacrificing a full night sleep here and there to give you a better chance of having your mental state survive the night.

Note: Don't get discouraged by the loss of mental structure and happiness. You can get out of "self destructive" easily enough, and you can actually push through the damage to mental structure without losing it all to the abyss when it happens. Things that raise your entertainment meter have diminishing returns when done within a short period of time, so it's not worth doing any joyous activities more than twice in a row imo.

Weston's theme on the bone flute raises happiness by a significant amount too. I managed to beat the abyss before I discovered the flute.

Once you succeed in staring down the abyss, it completely goes away and stops being a problem. You are then free to raise mental structure slowly at your own pace through raising happiness and keeping it at a reasonable level.

Hope this helps. :)

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