At the start, avoid fighting at all cost.
Reason: usually, melee combat without any proper preparation is usually a terrible terrible idea. Fighting beasts with your bare hands is not a wise choice in real life. Common sense
What to do?
Get armed, best early weapon is stone spear (or aka in this game is granite spear). 1 sharpened granite from crafting 2 granites or you just rng with mining. First choice is to look for mountains or rocky place. If you happen to have a granite pickaxe at the start, you are lucky, that means you can mine granite.
Reason: most likely you will encounter giant rats at the start or lucky, you encounter rabbits. these creatures provide hides. Offal is a good source of string since you don't eat them anyway. Another reason is that most creatures on land in early game are quite weak against piercing in some ways. Just don't try to fight a bear or a wolf unarmored. RUN AWAY FROM THEM
Next is to scavenge for foods. Now normally, you would hunt for meat to survive right? But this is no meat eating challenge. So, what are in the store? Maple seeds are usually the thing I try to hoard on coastal (common on normal mode).
another note: if you start on volcanic, you are pretty much dead. I tested and nope, no viable food beside meat and constant heat draining. Thankfully, we do not start on such islands. Other islands, there seem to be chances.
Arid islands, try to look for coconut or cacti which have fruits (ripe stage), if lucky, joshua trees are good.
Arctic island, your best option would be pine tree seeds collection and since you have constant hunger on check, make sure you should leave in 3-4 days. Another note is that you can drink water to stay alive. It sounds dumb but it may keep hunger in check but the problem is you have to start fire like regularly and not very good hunger check. Another common things to find is roots. Roots are very nice to have in case of emergency.
Wetlands island, try to find way to get mushrooms and yeah, that is pretty much it.

Next up, build a base
What should the base look like?
usually, you should find location like near mountain foot. My best of choice is usually U shaped one, because I can wall up the rest faster. However, you can try to get your feet on big mountain with fresh water nearby. But also should be close to the sea(for later mid game). Digging inside mountain like how ants make their nest is also a very good plan since you waste less time on walling while have more time to forage foods

After the base building, what to do?
Find apples. Sounds funny? Nope, you should plant apple trees to get a sustainable life. Keep in mind that mobs also trample the tree (with the exception of claw worms and flying mobs as I know so far). No apple nearby? Roam.

So what is the most promising ranged weapon in this game that is both very easy to craft and easy to obtain? Wooden spears. crafted from a pole and anything sharpened
Throw the sharp sticks would give you a big leap in term of combat in the open space. You can leveling throwing by just practicing in this game literally.

Throwing skill is indeed one of the most powerful skill. So better get around 3-4 dozens of sharp sticks and throw them and pick them around until you can consistently get 2 tiles range.

Some might say milk is considered vegan but this guide is all about not consuming meat/insects so any animal liquid that can be obtained without killing is considered okay for this guide. -> goats are an option if you want to get very nutritious liquid to travel around. Tame some goats, guide them to hitch post, then drop all things that is taming them (usually seeds, leaves(except pine or cypress, but I do know that goats would eat any leaves that they can find in real life anyway), barks and fruits)

in mid game stage after you survive on basically maple seeds and water, you should get hand dirty. try to hunt giant rats and rabbits for their hides. Also avoid snakes and spiders when you are not fully armored or not having medicine water.
Tanned hides are very very useful. Try to get water sacks like 4-5.
well, if the water near your base runs out, sea water distilling is a very good option. 2 granite, one pole and one string.
how many you should make? around 4-5 if you want to.

So why do I ask you to do this? Because a preparation to get to an arid island. You will need a lot of water. I recommend you to sail at day. Also our long staple ration, you guess it, maple seeds or grass seeds.

The objective on arid island is to obtain two of my favorite sustainable items: coconut and joshua tree (fruit or seed). Planting coconut gives you a major upper hand in term of container production and joshua tree resource can be optimize to the bone(leaves for rope, stump, flower for medicine and fruit to eat)

Do whatever you want to have fun. For me, I would just goof around for a long time for a game anyway. Build train road system, hunt treasures, go island to island, or just have fun.
That is all
:))))))

mindhijacker (me) (coastal guide one)
too lazy to do arid starting guide (to be added contributor)
too lazy to do arctic starting guide (to be added contributor)
too lazy to do wetland starting guide (to be added contributor)
literally if very insane to do volcanic starting guide (to be added contributor)