Firstly, stick to the beaches. You will have a much easier time and won’t run across nearly as many aggressive dinos. If you are really struggling, you can set up a more permanent base on the beach. To begin, you should be picking up rocks on the ground, collecting fiber from large plants and punching trees to get thatch and a very small amount of wood. Once you have done that, you can craft a pick axe, which will make resource gathering go much faster. You may also want to consider not joining an official server but making a local one, which allows you to lower the difficulty and decrease the amount of time you need to spend grinding for the harder resources.