TIPS
Originally from /r/dnl by Xenoit (reposted here with permission of original author) subsequent edits by wiki editors.
Food/Water - Berries & Apples can be Harvested from Bushes and Trees & Wooden Barrels all over the starting towns. They respawn quickly. Water can be found at fountains all around town, just hop in and tap 'E' to drink.
Gold - Harvest basic resources, and sell them to the NPC merchants. You will need full 'sets' of items (30 to 100) in order to sell them off. Do this to get at least a couple hundred Gold.
More on Merchants - Donating gold to Merchants gives them more and better items. And can be pretty cheap (20 gold gives the first upgrade, this probably scales, but I have not tested.) Recommend upgrading the food vendor, so that she sells focus potions and more. Merchant upgrades seem to reset every day, or possibly every 24h since donation. As such, you may just want to donate the 20g it takes to get the food vendor to sell you Focus Potions, and then maybe invest in a city house if you want one, and there is an unclaimed plot on your server.
Horses - Each starting town has a stable, and you can buy your first mount for 135 gold. Once you buy it, open the inventory, and drag the saddle that it comes with, into the saddle slot on the lower left side! They eat grass from their inventory, so toss all that grass you collected getting gold to the horse so it has some food. BE CAREFUL around town! Running close to a guard will knock it back, and anger it! (Same with all NPC's and Players! So in town be slower and more careful, so you don't piss a bunch of guards off and lose your first horse!) Horses have a pretty good weight capacity, so they can hold a lot more than you. You will want to have one for adventuring to store loot on (as well as get you around quicker) and for crafting, as it can hold a bunch of whatever base item you need. You may want to tell it to be more passive than aggressive, press and hold 'E' while looking at it to bring up a radial menu that will let you change it's stance, and other options. That same mechanic works on all Tames, and most objects as well (Locking doors/chests, etc). There are Multiple Tiers of Horse, the lowest cost being 65G. At least in the Human city.
Horses price scale based on level. The low seems to be about 65g for a horse under level 10, to over 1200 for a horse at level 110. THERE are some bugs with horses randomly disappearing - I've noted it on my private server after both crashes and normal restarts. Due to this, use the storage room of your horse sparingly, don't store things that are important on them! There is some info that Horses from the cities are just Rentals for 24 hours. They are still despawning on crashes and restarts, at least they did when I tested it on my private server. However once that issue is fixed, they will probably keep the 24 hour rental time. This should give you enough time to get your first real Tame with saddle to take over for the horse!
Housing - There are houses for rent cheap - however, they don't seem to actually let you in yet, at least for the small hovels. So at this point, I'd grab one mostly to invest gold before adventuring, thus giving you the claim on the house for when it gets fixed. However, you may also want to upgrade vendors before staking out a broken house (plus, you can build your own house out in the world!) Dev confirmed there are some bugs with housing that will be dealt with but are not high priority. Other players have had success using the Radial Menu on the Sign or the Door (sometimes one or the other, usually sign) will let you open the inventory of the house, and provides 300 slots of storage. Building houses - Currently the meteorite spawns are in specific locations, and when they fall, they also spawn enemies, skeletons and wraiths. These are able to smash straight through straw faster than a big bad wolf chasing pigs. And will kill you quite handily. Since the spawn locations for the meteors is a set location I recommend finding a place that doesn't have one landing next to your first house.
Filling Focus - Focus is food for mana, but filling it back up is a pain until level 10 when you can craft and use a bedroll. Flowers slowly fill it, and the best way to get flowers isn't mentioned very well. You use a Stone Sword on well, flowers, to harvest them. Toss em on your hotbar to eat them without going into your inventory. Highly recommend grabbing the first food vendor upgrade so she sells focus potions, and buying those from them (36 gold each) as they work way better than flowers, and gold is pretty easy to come by.
Skills - Skills 'U' are leveled by action, not spent point. So, to get the fireball spell, you need to use a stone pick-axe to harvest sulfur from the rocks strewn around. (Once you unlock the Warmth Schematic, you can craft that while harvesting more sulfur to double your xp gain to get fireball faster.) Each skill shows you what you can do to increase that particular skill.
Quests - Only the first chain completes. Second chain gets stuck on Selling Supplies to Vendors, Third chain might not progress past create Stone Sword. Have been unable to change or disable quest tracking, but I might be missing something obvious in this regard hah. Developer comment to question about changing tracker/quest not updating: “@Xenoit Not at the moment [you can not change the tracker] but fixing the tracking for the trouble quests is a Top Priority. We'll look at how to improve the system overall as well.” - Also, the Third quest Line may require getting to level 8 to continue it.
More Info - Crafted gear will “always” be of “Grey” quality. While gear dropped from monsters(Skeletons) are usually “White” and above.
- Gray Crafted Wood Bow = 55 dmg
- White Wood Bow = 64 dmg
There's also Rare & Epic, But I haven't found a weapon version of them yet to compare them with.
Attack Only increases melee damage, so Bow & Arrow & Magic is unaffected by it.
More on these stats in comments below!
[Thanks to Problemsz for this info!]
Early Crafting [/u/Problemsz again with the awesome info!] You can craft Iron & Copper Items in the main cities BEFORE you have unlocked the Schema's to craft them yourself. So, if you find Iron or Copper ore to mine, grab it, and use it to grab better tools, weapons, and armor WAY earlier than you could otherwise! From the Elf City main entrance, you can walk in a (laragish) circle around and into the mountains where there is Iron in abundance. Just be careful oof the flying meanies and spiders. You can agro both into any Kebos or Boars around to get them off of you. If you have a horse, you are fast enough to outrun most enemies, but if you are hooofing it, keep a close watch out for neutral animals to use as agro bait and keep you alive!
Gathering Each tool will gather different materials at different rates.
Sword: Flowers & Grass
Staff: Magic Shards (Must use Draining spell - hit trees and rocks with it)
Throwing Knife/Iron Knife: Hide
Axe: Wood & Stone
Pickaxe: Twine & Sulfur
Scythe: Fur & Apples & Seeds for crops
Many Tames will also harvest at a higher rate than is possible by hand. Tamed Melee Damage skill increases their harvest per hit as well. Even More! In general I recommend running around your starting city gathering and selling until you have the cash to buy some basic adventuring items - a set of armor, small stack of food, a ranged weapon or spell (Bow+Arrow or Fire Ball) and a decent understanding of the slightly odd targeting/combat. Lots of things want to kill you and eat you, or make you look like a noob, by knocking you out and stealing everything you own, leaving you naked and unconscious in the middle of the road… IE: Goblins.
Check out Cool_Fox's Thread as well for more info and advice!