This guide is created based on the Beta 2.5.7 version (4/12/18). At this point in time, there is a tutorial in the game which teaches you how to do quite a few things, and if you are brand new to the game I recommend playing through that tutorial before attempting to do the things I suggest here.

I do recommend modifying a few game options:

Turn on:
Tooltips for all options
Always show more information

This will allow you to hover the mouse over any object to see it's status and condition. You are going to be watching for "ripening" trees especially, you also may be waiting for trees to recover from your chopping at them, so you will want to watch for the "appears to be unscathed" text too.

This guide assumes you are starting a new game, that you know the basic controls and the mechanics covered by the tutorial. After this section, this guide is intended for new players and offers ideas and techniques for getting off to a strong start even if you started with nothing immediately useful and no visible resources, but the rest of this section briefly explains how to control your alignment extremely easily:

Watch for "ripening" trees, and use your hands to harvest (not gather) from them. You will almost never get hurt, and each attempt to harvest will improve your benignity by about 20 points, and even without any gardening skill you'll usually succeed within 3 tries. Cypress and spruce trees yield seeds in cones, which give another boost to benignity when you dismantle them. Find a forest and wander around looking for the ripe trees; since you're using your hands to harvest you won't even have to replace tools and suffer malignity increases from that as you improve your alignment; you can usually ignore having a hoe until you're ready to start planting.

When convenient, fill some empty dirt with maple seeds. Don't worry about blocking walkways; you can walk over seedlings and vegetative trees (without trampling them) and are going to gather these plants before they block you. Gathering seedlings gives one plant roots and one branch, gathering vegetative maples gives an extra set of leaves, and unlike gathering from more mature trees, you have a huge chance to successfully gather these plants with one try and only one gathering will remove the plant totally, so getting them out of your way only increases your malignity a tiny bit but gives you two cordage items, perfect to turn into string or woven fabric>bandage to boost your benignity even more. I don't recommend planting spruce, they give twigs instead of a branch; but this harvest method allows you to keep reusing the same space and benefit from all the cordage, which can be used to make incredibly many bandages and keep your benignity extremely high so you can safely do everything else you want to do.

Check out your items and the area around you. Try to stay out of deep water (swimming will tire you quickly, and you want to put your initial energy into controlling your alignment) and start scouting around for items you can easily loot.

If you can just get your alignment to stay positive, the most dangerous creatures won't even spawn (above ground... until you find treasure). And if you are surrounded by nothing but desert and sandstone, rumor has it that kinder lands lie to the north and/or east.

To begin, the most important resources you can have are wooden poles, string, and sharpened rocks, which allow you to craft the stone tools you need to get started and to maintain your alignment.

Sharpened rocks allow you to dismantle other objects, so they are arguably the most essential of these resources. Two large rocks can be used to turn one of them into a sharpened rock, and you can find large rocks lying around (pick up safely), or as "a pile of rocks" which will yield a large rock and "stones". Stones can only be thrown; I recommend leaving them behind as training throwing will worsen your alignment, and until you can control your alignment it is best to avoid making it more negative than essential and they are heavy and common. You can also find sharpened rocks lying around, and "shale" which functions identically to sharpened rocks.

The easiest ways to get wooden poles, even if your starting equipment does not help you harvest at all: look for logs lying around, they can be dismantled into 5 wooden poles and 2 tree bark; or look for branches lying around, which can be dismantled into a wooden pole, one "leaves", and one "twigs" . Or look for "seedling" or "vegetative" maple trees, which are risky to gather by hand, but seem safer than full sized trees and yield a branch and plant roots.

The easiest ways to get string is to make it from any two pieces of cordage. Tree bark can be dismantled into two units of cordage (and tree bark can be gained from finding logs or finding it lying around). Walking the seashore can reveal "bladderlocks", which can usually be safely collected by hand and will serve as one unit of cordage. Gathering young trees will yield plant roots, each of which works as a cordage, and most growing plants can be gathered to yield plant roots as well (try to wait for the plant to be "ripening" before gathering it, for maximum harvest and to ensure there will be seeds for replanting). Wheat and switchgrass plants can be gathered to yield a material you can dismantle into seeds and a unit of cordage.

Sometimes you will begin next to vast forests and giant mountain ranges, with ready-made tools in your inventory and useful resources at hand and in sight around you. Other times you will start with a container of non-purified water, not so useful stones, a bare bone, and a handful of twigs, standing on a stretch of sand that offers precious little stone, wood, or cordage... not to mention precious little water or means to make a fire to purify your scummy water bottle.

This guide is going to assume that you are having the roughest start possible, and do not quickly find enough materials to make a full set of needed tools. The most important tools are those that ensure you can replace tools that wear out, and that you can improve your alignment. The essential tools:

A stone pickaxe (needs 2 sharpened stones, 1 wooden pole, 1 string) is used to safely and efficiently turn solid rocks into useable rocks. It is an excellent choice for your first tool, as long as you can find mountain to turn into the rock chunks you need (in a pinch, if you are trapped in sandy areas, try to find a cave entrance. Rock is very plentiful underground, and even though there are deadly monsters down there, you can usually harvest a little rock from right beside the cave entrance, enough to start... just run to the entrance if you see movement anywhere. The enemies will not follow you out).

A stone axe (same resources as a pickaxe) is used to safely and efficiently gather wood from trees. There are many sources of wooden poles and cordage that can be gathered without resorting to an axe; if you can only make one tool only choose an axe if you have found plentiful rocks and very little poles or cordage, but can see trees to harvest (Don't bother with Coconut trees; they do not yield branches, thus no poles). This tool is also the best thing to wield should your work spawn a "claw worm"; they are immune to stone spears which are the best weapon for killing most of what you will hunt once you are ready to start hunting (after your alignment is controlled).

A stone hoe (1 sharpened rock, 1 wooden pole, 2 string) is the most essential tool you can have, except it cannot be used efficiently to replace itself as it wears out, which is why I list it third. But it is with a hoe that you will ensure you have excellent control both of your alignment and enough resources to heal yourself almost endlessly as you learn how to survive in the game as well as giving you endless wooden poles after you start using it to farm trees.

It is around this point that I recommend you focus on the steps in the first part of the guide (tree farming); each tree seed you harvest, hoe soil for, and plant should gain you around 140 positive benignity and the forested areas have enough seeds to allow you to reach tens of thousands of benignity fairly quickly. I recommend keeping yourself between 4-6 thousand in the positive; each time your strength increases you will drop a thousand, and one fight could cause your alignment to change a couple thousand to the worse.

A stone hammer (1 string, 1 wooden pole, 1 large rock) is an extremely useful tool if you have very limited resources; while it lasts it gives you the chance to fix essential tools without using any more resources. If you have plentiful resources you can skip this until you realize you have made a fine item that is worth repairing instead of replacing; if you cannot afford the stone or wood to make new tools a hammer is an efficient way to stretch what little you do have.

A stone spear (1 string, 1 wooden pole, 1 sharpened rock) is a good weapon, capable of quickly killing rabbits, large rats, snakes, and goats even in the hands of a starting character. But making this will worsen your alignment, attacking will worsen your alignment, killing these creatures will greatly worsen it, harvesting the corpses will also worsen it... and if you gain strength as you battle, your alignment can drop by 1000 points from that alone; if at all possible you want your alignment greatly positive before you fight.

A stone shovel (same resources as a hoe) can be very useful in gathering the soil needed to create fertile soil, which lets you increase the number of specific plants (certain ones will greatly multiply) you have to harvest. It also allows you to try to dig for cave entrances, fresh water, and other materials (such as clay!) but none of these are essential beginning of the game urgently needed resources (there are better ways to get water, you could die of thirst trying to dig for it) so this tool can wait until you can easily spare the resources to make it.

The tutorial taught you how to make a stone water still; that's a very inefficient way to keep yourself drinking because each time you pour or drink from a liquid container it takes damage; the pour of water into the still doubles the damage your container takes with every drink.

If you dig into "shallow fresh water" you can sometimes deepen it (and it becomes impossible to dig there anymore); if you fill your container from this sometimes the spot goes dry, but sometimes it simply turns back into shallow fresh water (and rarely it stays deep fresh water). You can sometimes reveal more water by digging where fresh water used to be. Digging next to where fresh water is can reveal more water. Digging in random places where there is soil (not sand, usually not clay or gravel) can reveal water... sometimes more than 10 "soils" deeper.

Going into the caves can help you find more fresh water; sometimes it is good and deep and you can just keep filling your container.

Exploring aboveground can reveal areas with snow; this can be shoveled into snow that can be used to craft your empty container into an unpurified water container.

Many plants add water when you eat them; cucumbers and coconuts are some of the best because they usually add equal amounts of water and food. You can use fertile soil to increase your numbers of any sort of plant, but cucumbers give two meals per plant, and unlike coconuts, eating the cucumber gives seeds to plant again (the whole coconut has to be planted, no meal if you want more trees). Watching what you eat can help a lot, most types of meat worsen thirst, so avoiding those meals can help stretch your water supplies a lot.

Once you have control of your alignment and are keeping it safely in the positive few thousand, once you have enough resources, food, and drink to not worry about death, it's time to explore - where you have already explored.

Most animals will spawn around you, perhaps 20-60 squares away. Many of them are timid and will flee as you approach - until they run into deep water, a dead end of trees, or the side of a mountain. To easily find animals, just walk the perimeter of the area around where you spend most of your time; check the sea shore when you can see well, also the "open inner edge" that usually forms between a stretch of forest and mountains.

I recommend ignoring normal rats and chickens unless you have a major shark infestation; food should not be a problem for you at this point and hunting these animals offers almost nothing but a chance to worsen your alignment and gain materials you already should have plenty of. However, rabbits and giant rats are well worth hunting, as those critters will drop an animal pelt - and you can turn that into leather. Also worth hunting are goats, which hit much harder than rabbits but drop a pelt and fat - which can be used to make strong long lasting torches (think weapon; this is a useful thing to take into the caves, not just so you can see, but also it is a good way to kill skeletons, zombies, vampire bats, and ghosts.

As you work on making your leather, and craft your bark shield you may realize that this guide's method of tree farming doesn't give you much bark! The most efficient bark sources are usually cypress or coconut trees; in a pinch mature spruce seem to give more bark than birch. You can also gather from dead trees (killing live trees if more dead are needed) to gain logs (dismantle into 5 poles and 2 bark)... and currently dead trees will "heal" from being gathered just like live trees, so you can often get many logs from the same dead tree if you keep watching for it to return to looking "unscathed".

You are likely to see a lot of sharks if you can see the seashore. Stay away from them at first if you can - but a full set of leather clothing will make you strong enough you can face sharks safely, even if all you have to fight them with is that stone spear. They can't hurt you much either once you are wearing all leather, and ideally a bark shield in your other hand as well. Another tip for better defense: you can just let time pass as you stand next to a cornered small rat or rabbit; they will occasionally try to attack you. If you are wearing armor this damages it; you can repair or replace it as needed but each attack helps train your parry, which helps you defend yourself much better. If you are NOT wearing armor, you will take a good bit of damage, but your tree farming will have yielded you huge amounts of cordage, enough to make "woven cloth" and turn that into bandages - use them to heal 12 health each, and train your anatomy skill as well, which helps with combat and healing as you improve.

And, if you have to deal with sharks but cannot kill them yet - kill any animal you can and carve it for meat - and "offer" that meat to any shark you have to face. This will instantly tame it, and even though the taming will not last long, the shark will remember you are not an enemy and will ignore you unless you attack it. Taking several pieces of meat (cooked or raw) with you can allow you to swim long distances in great safety - just make sure you encounter any sharks one at a time so you can feed each without getting eaten by the ones you haven't fed yet.

I don't recommend taming most animals, unless you have made a structure to "pen" them in; while tame they will follow you and can easily trample your plants unless you stay away from that part of your territory until the animal forgets that it trusts you. I also don't recommend taming sharks if you intend to hunt them later; it is far easier to hunt a shark that wants to hunt you than it is to swim after one that can't care less about you.

Once you have a full set of leather armor, you are quite ready to start exploring the caves... not ready to defeat everything you will find there, but you will be able to survive fights with most of the common creatures down there and should survive to flee from most of the rest. Remember to bring plenty of cordage/fabric/bandages; your tree farm is excellent at producing cordage so you can heal extremely fast as well as keep your alignment as high as you wish.

There are materials far better than wood, stone, and leather. There are many secrets in the game, both above and below ground. This guide should help you in getting a very strong start, but the next steps and discoveries are up to you. Good luck!