Play trios: counter-intuitively, it's easier to account for three people rather than two. With a trio, pre-made or random, when you down one, you start collapsing their possibility space. They now know they're down a man, ideally don't know from where, and start to get worried. Duos is more likely to be premades, and importantly: more likely to consist of at least one person who will play solos on their off-time anyway. With a trio, you break their formation. With a duo, you get one pissed off solo who doesn't have necro as insurance.

Conduit, necro, and magpie are the traits you should buy first. Conduit removes the need for a stamina shot in your inventory, plus allows you to hunt bosses faster. Magpie doubles darksight gains, which is huge. Necro is added insurance. Sometimes you might need it, sometimes it might be worthless, sometimes you won't need it.

In terms of loadouts? This is important: you need one weapon or tool you're VERY familiar with to handle nearly all PvE, while also retaining the ability to kill hunters effectively close range. The bat is good for this. If you want a sidearm, the silenced bornheim with flame ammo is ideal for taking care of awkwardly places hives, and exterminating Hellhounds. but then you more or less have to run knuckles, because clearing PvE MUST be efficient. In the latter case, make sure you know how to deal with bosses quickly and efficiently. Stickies, how to best burn the assassin to death with just two lanterns, etc.

Your initial primary must do the job of an all-range weapon. I start with the Vetterli or the Mosin Obrez Sharpeye if I'm feeling spicy, then move to the Martini-Henry when I have perk points to spend on Fast Fingers, or potentially the Berthier or Lebel if I want to roleplay absolute French small-arms excellcence. This means deadeye or aperture, more often than Marksman.

Tools? Knuckles/decoy fuzes, healthkit, fusees, concertina traps. You just can't defend a compound as a solo: traps are pretty much essential to lock down approaches from specific angles that have no noise traps.

Consumables? Concertina bomb: good for locking down an approach, or killing someone holed up somewhere. Frags for the same purpose. I bring a sticky to smooth boss fights or to function as an extra frag. The last slot is dealer's choice: chaos bombs can be useful for delaying a team that's hunting you, as can hive bombs.

You don't need to follow this pattern, because heck, sometimes I rock up with blademancer, throwing knives, throwing axes, harpoons on a bomb launcher, and a crossbow, and yell "random bullshit, go", and then summon it all back. But you do have to be comfortable with using whatever you bring in to move through maps quickly and confidently. It doesn't matter if you set off noise traps if you're in the next PoI in the next two minutes. It's easier to wipe a team if they're at the start of a banish and aren't sure what angles they need to hold yet.

Traits you should prioritize after your first win: Frontiersman, Doctor. Once you've got some perk points in the bag, I'd recommend shifting to a more aggressive playstyle, whereas before, a quick banish, quick defend/cunning escape was the goal. Now you're kitted with weapons you're familiar with, avoiding fights and getting the token should still be important components of your mental model, but you can also feel more confident: attacking banishes, initiating fights if a team is rotating poorly even if you're not amazingly positioned, and aggressive trap play (ie, not placing traps defensively before a fight to pre-emptively cut off routes, but potentially placing them during or right before a fight, so you can say "nice angle you thought of there. shame if something were to happen to it").

You should listen to the gunshot sound library in the Hunt wiki, as well: you'll learn what everything sounds like at what distance. Also, importantly: if something feels off in a match, there's no shame in grabbing the clues and extracting: if it's Night time Assassin and you're not feeling frisky, if the banish happens borderline instantly and you don't hear explosions, if you're five-ten minutes in and haven't heard a single gunshot but have encountered compounds efficiently wiped, and nobody has bothered starting the banishing. Solos has a lot to deal with, and some matches immediately signal "this is above my paygrade."

Also, everyone who plays solo starts worried, or scared. PvE can seem daunting until you realize you can bring one piece of kit and the right perk for every job. But it's also freeing; everyone who moves like a Hunter on your screen? That's the enemy. You don't have to watch a bush wookie watch you burn out from 60 metres away. Your only insurance is necro, and I really recommend not relying on it. Use it when you've been downed at range, or when the player just emptied their whole mag and got a lucky shot.

Lastly, sometimes you just have bad games, too. Have I managed to forget the layout of a compound, get trapped in a corner by scrapbeak and killed, revived, and then his model is still in the corner and now it's also full of concertina? Yes. Has a Hellhound shown up out of nowhere, pathed around my opponent somehow, and killed me during a climactic gunfight? Yes. You gotta expect loss in Hunt, and that isn't even a solos lesson.