A simple summary for your first few weeks.

1. Water
Wash yourself when you get very hot to lessen sweating ( more effective with clothes on)
Wash yourself before you explore the jungle areas
Explore the jungle areas in the early morning (4~7 a.m.), late evening (4~8 p.m.), or when it is cloudy or raining slightly to avoid overheating.
Drink coconut water
Gather first rain in 8 coconut shells
Gather water from mud puddles(wetlands)
Gather water from the cave (explore wetlands)
Gather water from banana stems
Build a lot of clay vases, build water reservoir (ideally while the 2nd or 3rd rain comes)

For day 60~90 dry season : You will need at least one of these. 1. Alembic for converting sea water. 2. Many glazed vases, cooking pot for water supply. 3. Cut nipa palms from the mangrooves for sap instead of water.

2. Food
Do not get hurt (Wounds drain your nutrition)
Cook everything before you eat it
Eat coconut, bananas, crabs, shells, yam early on
Get trapping percentage to 20% for fish trap unlock (bait dead fall traps with bugs found in the wetlands cave)
Make 15+ fish traps as soon as you can (they get better on as your trapping skill improves but are a bit slow in the early days)
Fish traps were nerfed hard. But there are a lot of new good ways to sustain your meals.
I recommend these 3 for your staple food : 1. Foraging tide pools(rocks), mango trees(western jungles), almonds(eastern grasslands + monkey companion needed for peeling almonds easily)
2. salgo bread from sago tree (wetlands). This is efficient when you have a copper axe and I usually do.
3. Log traps, or holes for easy meat source + leather.


3. Fever
3-1 Make your jungle visits under 8 hours or apply bug repellent.(prevent bug bites)
Keep yourself happy, clean and dry. (prevent disease)
3-2 Cure fever from bug bites with spider lilly. (Found in wetlands)
Cure fever from disease with spider lilly. (Other methods are viable but not that effective)


4. Monitor lizard raids -> removed?
4-1 How to avoid -> Put all meat items in chests (prevent them from stealing meat)
4-2 How to fight -> Make spear before day 30+ (bow usually unlocks later on)
Train bow or spear to 100% or at least over 50%
Make sure some aloe or water is available for wound dressing
Always keep your weapon in hand and fight those lizards


5. Getting animal skin
If you have chosen to fight lizards and boars, you will get enough skin
Otherwise, you will need to trap animals for skin
make 5+ log traps and bait them with food that doesn't spoil (like salted fish, yam, fat)
The traps will take awhile especially if you have not made a lot of fish traps and have low trapping skill


6. Surviving storms
Storms can be awful as they will blow all your valuables away (sometimes great for reducing lag)
There are 3 options.
Make your base in a cave - Rocks, wetlands (They both come with some disadvantages)
Make your base in the beach and rush a hut.
Keep all your important stuff in the inner area (deep jungle etc), in chests, or sacks which you can hold.

7. Sail to civilization
Take yourself a bare minimum of 2 supply chests full with a lot of fiber or cord, non-spoiling food, wilson, and 3 water vases in your hand.
Also it is good to usually make all the add-on's available on the raft. Sailing is tough.
Keep the sail rolled up in unfavorable winds
Fix the sail with cord
Wash yourself when hot
Nap or rest to space out your back pain
Be wary of salty food as it will dehydrate you faster


8. Surviving isolation and loneliness
The hardest factor to prepare for.
Bring wilson around the island with you at all times, his presence gives you a minor boost.
Talking to wilson will bring your loneliness down fast. But talking too much is not good.
For max isolation which will inevitably come on day 90 you will need:
1. Comfort which comes from your house. Build a house with all the furniture and upgrades you can do. Also fill the shelves and bookshelves with pretty stuff and carvings. This is hard to achieve but will give you an easy life after on.
2. Make enough monkey companions. I have never tried this myself. But 1~2 monkey companions have a quite big impact on my loneliness. Maybe about 5 will be enough without comfort?

Water : This will be the most important factor in surviving your early days. You will have to drink coconut water and rain water for the first few days.

The first rain will always come early (during the shift from day 1 -> day 2 6:00). Gather the rain in about 8 coconut shells and you will have plenty water before the rain spoils.

Being hot makes you sweat and get thirsty more quickly. You can counter this by taking a bath or swimming every time you get hot.

I tested the effect of the hot status and washing whenever I got hot. It gave me 1.5x more time before I got dehydrated. I suspect that the very hot status drains hydration 50% faster and the hot status drains it 25% faster. (This probably got patched to include more various status)

In conclusion, it is worth to keep washing yourself everytime you get hot when you need to conserve water. (Just do not over do the washing and stay too cold that would cause fever.)



So how do we secure water?

1) Get to the wetlands and find puddles. After that you can boil the puddle water to make them safe for drinking. Puddles are great. You can get 5 scoops from them initially and 10 scoops after they are replenished from rain.

2) Dig up mud(26 of them) while the second rain comes so you can prepare to make a kiln and at least 2 clay vases for your water supply.

3) For additional water you can find the cave and explore it to find unsafe water trickling out. You can get about 2 water scoops every 2 days from here and this will be enough for you to survive before you can store water in clay vases.

After you get vases your water problems will be solved and this will enable you to eat coconut as your main diet making the game much easier.

+ You can sometimes get unlucky and the second rain will come after day 12 (I died of dehydration once due to this). In this instance you will have to use the additional water that comes out of banana stems in the jungle and wetlands to make it.

food. (This part is a bit outdated)

There are 2 main stats related to food.
1) Hunger
and
2) nutrition (Newly named as weight)

Hunger depletes quickly and is easier to fill.

The real problem is nutrition.

So how do we fill up the nutrition bar?

There are 3 steps

0) Do not get hurt! Wounds drain a lot !! of nutrition

1) You need a lot of food

This can be achieved by a lot of ways. The cooked dishes are almost always better then the ingredients themselves. And food that is hard to find/cook is generally more nutritious.
But they are hard to get so I will introduce my basic method.

0 - eat coconut whenever you can - There are a lot of palm trees so cut them, climb them, throw rocks at them and take a walk whenever you need a new palm tree. Also cooked coconut gives you less diarrhea + cooked food gives you more nutrition so try to always cook your food.
1 - Make over 5 deadfall traps (They require bait and provide crabs, lizards, and birds which give bones)
2 - Make a fishing rod (I usually use bones from the cave in the rocks place)
3 - Always fish 2~3 times after 8:00 pm. Fishing does not need additional light and does not consume more stamina. (Fishing in the rock area gives you another type of fish so try fishing there)
4 - After you eat the first few fish you catch, you will get some fish scraps. Use the scraps as bait for the fishing rod once, and after that eat the rest or put it inside a deadfall trap.
5 - You can repeat step 2,3,4 and that will give you plenty of fish to eat as your basic meal.


2) You need to eat food often

After you have all the food prepared, you just need to eat it!
When you overeat and get the full or very full status the hunger bar starts to drain faster. You can use this and constantly eat throughout the day to fill your malnutrition bar.

Other Tips

1) You don't need to sleep 8 hours full everyday go for a nap sometimes. Working under a fire or fishing in the moonlight are great ways to spend time before going to bed at midnight.

2) Making a lot of fish traps is a very good source of food. (I personally recommend 10+ traps)

3) Hunting boars for fat and meat is also a very good source of food. The fat you get from a boar can be consumed directly and gives a lot of hunger and nutrition points by itself but you will need to space out the time you consume it. (Use bows for a safe hunt)

4) If bait you put in a deadfall trap is about to spoil, it is better to eat it and replace it with a fresh one rather then let them spoil.

5) Bug bites can be avoided by making your base and sleeping location in the beach. There are more bugs the deeper you go in the jungle.

6) There is a lot of the info in the discussion forums, and the developer comments. It is a good idea to take a look there if you need additional help on something.