Starting Tips


 * When getting started, it's okay to be nomadic for a while. Nighttime might present a challenge, but generally it's safe to spend the night working on one of the huge trees from the top down. A good place to settle down should include: 1) a source of infinite water 2) either tumbleweeds or naturally-occurring crops 3) animals 4) trees. Your infinite water sources are limited to the ocean and rivers. A running river also provides a bit of a safety net to sweep away hostiles.
 * Rushes allow you to make thatch, which is handier than you might think. Since you can't make a door, and since you can pick up thatch with a Shift-Right click, it's the easiest way to keep zombies and such out of your house. Since you can make a totem pole right away, you only need two logs to make an ocelot totem that keeps the creepers from destroying everything. The work blade is your go-to tool for harvesting rushes, destroying leaves, and harvesting bark (Shift-Right click a log to harvest more than one bark, rather than doing so in your 2x2 crafting grid). Once you have wet thatch, it's best to make a wall or floor of it to dry it, rather than cooking it in a kiln. The kiln yields one thatch slab, but the full dried block of thatch can be harvested with a Shift-Right click to get two thatch slabs.
 * One of the worst parts of the early ages is the reliance on the water bladder to craft dough and leather. Here's a way to engineer a faster process. Pick a spot on your hotbar, like slots 1, 2, and 3. Put the bladder in slot 3 and the other two ingredients (salt and raw hide, for instance) in slots 1 and 2. When you're in your inventory, if you mouse over the 2x2 crafting area and press a hotbar key, it moves the hotbar item to the 2x2. So, once you're at a source of water, fill the bladder and open your inventory. As you move the mouse over the top two slots in the 2x2, press 1 and 2, then move the mouse to a lower slot and hit 3. Shift-click the result, then hit e-Right click-e and start over. It's far less work than moving everything in your inventory with your mouse.
 * Nutrition is going to sink you unless you pay attention to it. A pork or beef dinner will keep you topped off on hunger, protein, and vegetable needs. If grain and fruit begin to sink too low, seek rice and ironwood trees. Rice can be eaten raw even when you're completely full, and while that doesn't benefit you much, it does meet your grain needs for nutrition. Ironwood fruit that falls when you harvest the tree is similar and meets your fruit needs, but when you eat it while full it also fills saturation. If you are full on saturation and have lots of food at hand that you want to keep eating, pop a tasty yew aril. It'll kill you! Or, you'll keep eating and barely survive. Risk death for proper nutrition, just like nature intended.
 * Wild dog hide makes boots that you really do want to have, so if you can get your leather from any other source, do so.
 * Farming is easier than the progression chart makes it seem. Craft bonemeal + dirt. While you can get bones from most creatures, finding just one massive fossil will give you a lifetime's supply of potential bonemeal. If you're in an arid climate that has tumbleweeds, you really don't need to farm to get wheat. Just set up some cactus windbreaks, or some walls to funnel tumbleweeds into some cactus, and you'll have a harvest of a fat handful of goodies every day, including wheat. Don't be shy about placing hoppers at the feet of your cactus wall.
 * Some villager trades are necessary, but since they don't have doors you're going to have a hard time keeping them alive. If you let zombies infect the village, it might take a lot of exploring to find the right trade from another village.
 * Your "Merge to nearby chests" key in your inventory recognizes the primitive Immersive Craft chests, but not the shelves. So if you want to use that key, sort commonly-collected items into chests but not into shelves. If you pick up an "Unfamiliar item" that you want to keep, just toss it onto a hopper attached to a chest or shelf. Check back at a later age!