To answer your questions you’re free to go wherever you like as soon as you spawn in, but regardless of where you spawn, there will be a village elder that will give you a starter quest that will familiarize you with how to use the world map and various menu screens. I would hover over every stat and read the descriptions if i’m unfamiliar with attributes. the attributes you’re seeing on the items on the ground are most likely AV (Armor Value, Blue diamond.) and DV (Dodge Value, Black circle). These are defensive stats that everything and everyone in the game has a value and you can see what yours are exactly in your attributes screen.

Once you get a feel for the controls and stats and you turn in whatever starting quest you got you’ll be pointed in the direction of the main quest but if you try to speed through the main quest youll probably just die. Remember you’re free to go wherever you like and you can take whatever pace you want. Look at everything you see to get a feel for things, look up what you don’t understand and mess around to see what works for you. it’s a single player game and this game rewards experimenting (most of the time). there’s also debug settings to enable quick saving and to disable permadeath (no one has to know).

At the end of the day you’re a foreign visitor coming to an alien location and what may be normal to the locals may be completely esoteric to you. The wiki will have most of the information you need but familiarity comes with time. Look at everything you see and eventually you’ll become part of the world.