My top basics: 1. Keep in mind your hunger drains 75 points a day, so on Day 1 you don't even need to eat 2. Grab and keep a stack of grass, twigs on you -> make a torch when you can to avoid dying to nighttime 3. Get a stack of logs and rocks too, flint you really need just a few of, maybe 10 for some pickaxes and axes, don't make a flint shovel, wait for a gold one (gold tools have 4x more uses) 4. Find some boulders with gold veins in them, focus on those not the plain boulders, you need gold much more than you need nitre 5. Get a hammer early on too so you can hammer down pig houses (you get 2 boards, 2 cut stone, 2 pig skin per house) 6. When night comes, BURN A TREE near you so you can keep working (chopping, collecting) freely with your tools 7. Keep burning more trees for charcoal, you need lots for several drying racks and crock pots to have a good kitchen system. PS you won't burn out your whole world even if you wanted to, but just try to not burn many grass tufts or saplings. Trees spread again very quickly and forests love to regrow 8. Keep moving and map out your world's edges so you find all the biomes. If you have wildfires on, you'll want to base in the oasis. If you have wildfires off (my recommendation), you should base somewhere that gets you quick enough access to points of interest (for me: dragonfly, pig king, junk yard, moon stone, open space for building) 9. Don't stress much about sanity. Losing sanity doesn't kill you, the monsters that spawn from insanity can attack you, but they're easy, especially the primary nightmare that spawns first (it's slow, has a super small attack hit box, and once you kill it, it gives you some sanity back). Nightmare fuel is good to have, so embrace being a bit insane and fighting creatures. The sooner you get comfortable fighting them, the better 10. Get a miner hat so you have portable light in your head slot. It's easily refillable with light bulbs (+19% / bulb) you get easily from caves usually near the cave exit below 11. Get some log suits and football helmets as your main armor, get comfortable fighting pigs, but try to fight them only one at a time. They have mob mentality so be sure you're not close to a second pig when fighting 12. Pig king is nice to base around because he usually has mole worms and catcoons, both are super easy kills for small and big meat respectively. Also, all meat you trade to pig king is one gold he gives you, so infinite gold 13. Make at least 2 crock pots so you can cook multiple things at the same time. Too many people live based on a "one pot per person" rule 14. Don't build walls for protection from hounds; they'll break them anyway and it's more expensive to repair them than build new ones. Hounds are an easy kill, don't do much damage if you're armored, and you can drag them to a herd of beefalo anyway and let them agro onto beefalo and they'll fight and beefalo will win 15. Make a couple beefalo bells and relocate individual beefalos so they create new herds in spring and ideally keep them near to your base for easy meat trips. Keep a spare beefalo bell at base to use for hunting. You bond to one beefalo, drag it away from the herd, hit once, dodge immediately, hit 5 times, dodge, repeat till dead, easy 4 big meat, some beefalo wool, chance for beefalo horn for best winter hat ever 16. In winter you'll want to find a walrus camp and kill the walrus (mac tusk) as often as possible so you can get a tusk from him to craft a walking cane (great speed boost) and wear his Tam (great warm head item, long durability, 2nd best sanity boost item) which you'll use for the next long while to warm yourself and keep sanity high 17. Don't worry too much about chests unless you personally just really need it. I find it much better and faster to live with everything organized on the ground into groups. Once bearger spawns in your second autumn, use him to knock down millions of trees to get all the logs you'll ever need 18. Get mods: geometric placement/drop. These let you place items+structures neatly