You wake up on the beach clutching a chunk of wood with no idea of where you are.
On this Island everything except gazettes and zebra will try to kill you.
The water will kill you if your stamina bar drops to nothing, starving will kill you if you don't eat and then theres the hostile NPC's.
If you are attacked by a tiger, rhino, hippo or elephant just run. This is not a cowardly act it's just common sense, you cannot kill any of them without a decent weapon and a bit of experience.
Jump up on the larger outcroppings of rocks and they should run off leaving you alive and able to heal.

First off, find the sense button and familiarise yourself with some of the controls, change them around if you feel like they don't suite your play style. Just don't bind anything to G as it will break the ability to repair things.

Now, using sense you should find a number of bushes growing on the landscape, red berries will most likely be your diet for the first hour or so. Grab a couple of stacks of these and any flax that you can find these are bushes with blue flowers they are an important resource.

Next take that chunk of wood and start hitting the smaller rocks and trees with it, having gathered enough flax, wood and stone you should be able to craft a number of tools.
An axe, a pickaxe, a backpack and a bow, you will also need some arrows that you can craft from plain wood. three stacks of arrows should be plenty to get started.

Have a wander around the island, explore a bit of the map, you are on the first of a number of islands and it's quite large so it will take some time to map it out. On the way, keep an eye out for a safe place to start your first base. You can mark spots on the map with right click and enter some text.
Beware any ancient looking stone structures along the beach as these are populated by pirates.
Pirates are really nasty NPC's armed with pistols, they will shoot if you get too close and you will lose everything you have gathered as you will most likely die where they can continue to shoot you.
Just give them a miss for now.

Travelling along the beaches can be a good way to get some gear as there are often chests that spawn randomly next to ruined row boats.

Hopefully you have now been able to get a good idea of where you are on the first island and have found a spot that you can build your first base.
The best advice I can offer you here is to keep your first base simple, you will find a better spot and probably don't want to invest loads of work into a base thats doomed to failure.
This is a starting point that you will use for a few days while you get a better idea of the landscape.

A simple 4 by 4 or 6 by 6 structure will do for now, the building menu is accessed by pressing F5.
There are multiple tabs in the building menu that allow you to build a number of panels and equipment, like forges, boats and glider launchers.
To start you only really need foundations to start the base, walls to surround the foundations leaving one space for a door, roof's to cover the structure and posts if the roof won't build. Then place the builders desk a bed and some storage chests on the floor of your structure. Press E on the bed and you will now re-spawn here when you die.

At this point it is important to hunt, dump all your spare materials at the base and take only a bow with as many arrows as you can make. Be careful when hunting, you want to basically pick on the gazettes and zebra as they can only run but tigers and other dangerous animals spawn in the same place making it very risky to begin with.
chop carcasses with the axe to gain, bones, hide, fat and meat.

Once you have gathered enough of those materials return to your base and craft up some leather armour. You can also make a number of weapons from bone that might come in handy. If you haven't already done so, build a forge in your base as well to cook the meat.

With a bit of armour and a decent bow, you can now focus on the next step up, getting some better materials. On the starter island there is a large central mountain with a small clutch of trees on top of it in a valley. This mountain has two copper mines around its peak, they can be a bit tricky to find. You will need a couple of pick axes and at least three torches.

When you find one of the mines get in there and grab as much as you can, put the pickaxe in one hand and torch in the other.
Bronze is made from 9 copper and 1 tin so 20 tin will make 200 bronze, no need to gather large amounts of tin. You'll probably want around five stacks of copper and one of tin.
Try not to go too far in as you may run out of torches and get stuck in the dark.

Heading back to your base with a decent amount of copper it's time to start smithing.
Pressing E on the forge will place wood then E again to start the forge. Now bring up the menu with four tabs, unselect everything but the copper tab and go to materials.
Under materials select bronze type 99 in the box above the craft button and just wait while you turn that copper and tin into a few stacks of bronze. You should now be able to build a smithing table from bronze, wood and stone.
You will also be able to build an anvil, build this.

In the forge you will need to make a bronze hammer, then forge a bronze axe head and bronze pick axe head. Place them on the anvil and hit them with the hammer, a message will say they are ready.
Take the finished one before you can start hitting the next one.


Now the shaped heads can be used at your smithing table to craft them into the complete item using the same menu as in the forge. Now your cooking with gas.
These tools will work much faster than stone and last longer, you should probably also craft a lantern if you have enough materials left over and head back to the mine to get as much as you can carry for future needs. You should now also be able to make the bone bow.

Crafting bronze arrows and using them with the bone bow will allow you to kill just about any of the NPC's if you are careful about it. Fair warning, even with my hunting ability fully upgraded it still takes two shots with bone bow and bronze arrow to kill a tiger and they run fast. Hippos and rhino are a bit easier prey as they make for a better target and are a bit slower.

From this point you Have made a decent start in the game and have laid the path to success.

The map is your best friend in this game, the ability to mark important places, Knowing where you are, knowing places to avoid and the best places to gather materials.
The map enables you to do all this and more, so exploring the map should be a high priority early on in the game.

Building a boat is not difficult at 200 wood and 150 bronze or somewhere around there on differing servers and should be done once you have established yourself in the game with some decent tools, armour and weaponry.

SPOILER ALERT.
If you want to discover the islands on your own and where to get the best materials then scroll through the next few paragraphs.

copper and tin are most abundant in the two mines under the mountain in the middle of the starter island, there are four entrances and a hole connecting the upper mine to the lower.
If you bring enough lanterns and picks you can walk out with upwards of 2000 copper and easily 600 tin.

Iron can be found on the iron isle, on the southern east part of the map.
Getting Iron early on can be a huge advantage as Iron tools produce the most durable and effective tools and armour however the armour slow you down considerably.
There are two mines, the land mine and the water mine.
Just beware the water mine, go in with a boat and some fat or you'll drown or get stuck in the dark.
One entrance can't be accessed by boat the other can. If you don't get onto land within ten seconds of entering you are in the water mine.

Volcanite and obsidian can be found out to the far north east of the map, its a huge volcano, you cannot miss it but it isn't immediately obvious that its there from a distance. The ground is the enemy as there is lava surrounding the volcano. The best method i've discovered for getting volcanite is to prepare with fully upgraded leather armour or pirate armour, a decent stack or two of bandages, food and an iron pickaxe or two. Use the sense button often while searching for it as even in daylight it can be hard to spot. If you fall in the lava, don't panic just run and jump out of it and you should survive.

Leather, fat, bones and hide are most easy to come by on rhino isle to the north and treacherous meadow on the south west of the starting island. Elephants provide the most amount while gazettes the least. I wouldn't really try to kill an elephant without first upgrading the hunting range skill to five.
It takes three shots with the bone bow and bronze arrow with full ability.
Anything less and the elephant will be right on top of you stompin your brains out.

SPOILER OVER




Handy tips
I set the controls to my needs fairly early on and found that having easy access to the constant run button became invaluable on both land and sea.
You can be running while sorting through your inventory, checking the map, eating and learning the crafting menus.
The same is with the boat, simply set a direct course and press constant run and then peruse the inventory at your leisure.

Getting to know gliding can be a really rewarding experience, sailing boats is fun but gliding is fast.
It's just much more dangerous, Landing at speed on land will kill you instantly.
You have two choices for landing, land in deep water and live or force the glider to stall by pulling the nose of the craft up until it falls from the sky then press E when it hits the ground.
sometimes landing really slowly does work but there isn't much difference between really slow landing and just straight death. The wheels seem to be purely for launching the craft not landing it.

Mooring your boat is a good idea, just build a jetty 3 by 3 foundations into the water and build walls around your mooring point to give it a bit of protection. Place a builders desk inside and a door either end of the jetty and it should deter most people from stealing your boat.
nothing can stop them unless you really spend time on a good port.
But having walls around the mooring point is better then just having someone fire a couple of ballista shots and taking off with it.

Get your hands on Iron as soon as possible, you will increase the payout for mining and wood cutting by a huge amount. I saw a chart somewhere it might have been the wiki page that shows how much each item produces and the iron axe is vastly superior saving you hours of work chopping. The pickaxe seems to last for a very long time and produces similar results.
Don't be content with bronze as you will be forever casting repairing and chopping.
One iron axe produces enough wood for a three story 10 by 10 structure.
Bronze would be lucky to make one story.

Don't be overly concerned about getting your hands on the pistol early on, it's difficult to fire, costs huge amounts of gold and you'll likely get killed for owning it. Practising with the bow and sword can make you just as lethal. Get good at building bronze tipped arrows.
There is a certain distance you can sit away from the pirates with the bow that they won't attack until you shoot one them, then simply side step out of the way when they shoot and reload.
Five shots each will wipe them out and if you practise enough you can take a whole camp with thirty bronze arrows in about ten minutes.
By comparison, shooting them with the pistol, you may have to use thirty shots costing 150 gold and only receiving 70-90 gold in return.

Shipwrecks are an awesome source of wealth, get as much comfrey, flax, seeds and wood as you find and don't be afraid to dive deep to find the 2-3 chests that are somewhere around the wreck.
There are plenty of rocks that you can get up on and there are no sharks.
The main danger is if someone catches you there while you are diving they can take your boat and shoot you with a ballista.
Try these when you know there aren't any nasty players about or have a friend stand watch on the deck then share the booty.

You will find treasure maps around the map, the trick here is to not just start the hunt straight away.
get together about 4-6 maps then go three at a time, a lot of the chests that you find will have more maps and you can then start three more, then three more.
The most i've ended up with was about fifteen chests for one hunt. 1200 gold, a pistol, 30 shots and a bunch of random loot.
If you try it one at a time you'd be lucky to get 100 gold and a piece of armour.

Hoard fat, it seems like a fairly useless commodity but it actually becomes really valuable the further you get into the game. You'll end up with stacks of useless bones, meat and hide but always be searching for more fat.

The cheapest, easiest way to get volcanite is to buy it from the pirate trader. Unless you base on the volcano island. 25 gold for 100 volcanite.

Making friends is one of the most important elements of the game, help other players out, talk with them and join a clan if you can. Being a mad killer is only really going to be good if you don't have half the player list hunting you down destroying your bases.

While crafting bronze or steel you can do other stuff, it usually takes about ten minutes for the fire to go out, so it's a good time to make a coffee or a phone call or whatever real life needs you need to enact. If you press ESC you can go to the build menu and familiarise yourself with it better or go through all of the crafting items to learn more about what they do. So long as you don't move the avatar.

Don't cheat, there is an active anti-cheat program and even if you can bypass it everyones going to know pretty quick. Each player only has 100% speed and one hundred health, armour doesn't have that much of an effect and the pvp upgrades only give an advantage not god mode.
The weapon damage is seen by hovering over weapons so one hit killing with a sword is an obvious giveaway.
Just don't bother cheating, it's not worth it, people talk and they all have screenshot ability.
All cheating does for you is make you look pathetic and insecure.
You will most likely be banned as a result.

Unlike other titles that are similar to this game. The bases in "out of reach" can be made to be much more defendable. I won't mention the other titles but you can get a much safer base up quicker than any of them in this game.

There are a number of ways to attack a base and it's important to know them if you want to keep your booty away from raiders.


Ballista is the quickest and easiest, a couple stacks of wood and bronze can produce a ballista that will fire enough to get through a wood panel.

The trebuchet is similar but requires more materials and stone, it is more powerful than the ballista but more expensive.

cannons are currently only a threat if you build too close to the shore but are one of the most potent siege weapons.

Glider bombing is probably the easiest way to get in, a one story base is left wide open to glider attack.
Try not to build right next to a convenient hill or build on the hill as well as the bottom, if you do, to make it a more lengthy process for the attacker.

Keep the placement of your builders desk a secret. When you decide to start building a fully fledged fort make the lowest level large, 10 by 10 or so. Then build walls inside rather than beams as you won't be able to build barrier walls around beams or doors. Maze the first two or three layers of your base and hide the desk in a secret compartment, then after upgrading the desk all the way, wall it off. Build doors at key places to create a trap for anyone silly enough to climb in.

Once you have a few layers going you might want to grab a large cache of bronze or volcanite. Stones not so good but is okay if you have nothing better. Then upgrade the outer walls and the walls surrounding your desk and spend the rest upgrading the inner walls. Also upgrading doors first to bronze then steel is the best door and is really tough to crack. I fired a cannon at a steel door fifteen times and it was still there.

Once you have a few walls in between your desk and the outside walls you can start building up.
You don't need to make every layer of the base the same width but try to keep the desk under as many layers as possible so gliders can't just bomb their way through. About 6 layers will make glide bombing a nightmare. Most other forms of attack will be very difficult as well and cost a lot to get in.

Continue to gather as much volcanite and bronze as you can to upgrade every inner panel of the first few layers of the base and combined with the 72 hour waiting period after destroying your desk you'll be quite safe from there on out. Try not to store loads of building materials or weapons during the building process as they may be taken before you are fully secure.

As a finishing touch you can build a really high tower on top of your base using just 2 by 2 foundation, poles, a ladder to get up and 3 roofs. This is a really cheap and quick way to build a high gliding tower. Then at the top you need to stack poles on every possible spot and build the y support beams to expand the top to 4 by 4 and place four glider ramps there. Ilrac gave me that advice.

If you reach the stage of having three or four upgraded layers and another two or three basic wooden ones with steel doors blocking access from the roof and floor then you will be safe to leave that baby all week pretty much.

My own base has about five walls of volcanite and bronze from each side so ten all up and four story's of upgraded walls. Then a few layers of wood on top where i grow most of my crops.
It would take a group of five people about three days constant work to get to the desk (if they are lucky enough to find it) or it could take them all week.
Even if they do find the desk they then have to wait 72 hours to get anything out of it.
I don't really even keep much in my base for them to steal so the reward would kind of be a nasty surprise for them after all that work.

It takes a bit of work to get going but once you have a secure footing in the game you can enjoy roaming around the map, seeking treasure and fighting other players at ease.

You will familiarise yourself quickly with this system so i don't need to write a whole lot about it.

Every action in the game adds experience to the corresponding skill.

Killing animals upgrades hunting, I spent most of the points I earned on the range skill first and when fully upgraded there isn't an animal on the island that can reach me before I shoot it down.

Gathering, I upgraded the amount from each pick first but later found that the seeds skill is great for gaining an unlimited supply of plants, time to generate grown plants just doesn't really matter.
You'll spend so much time away from home that almost every time they will have grown by the time you get back.

Building upgrades are easy enough to earn, I spent equal parts on the builders desk and reduced cost of building, this allowed me to to build more and protect my base for longer. I only recently put some points on repair after fully upgrading the other two.

I found the gain more from each strike when chopping wood to be more important than more resources per tree and tool durability. It takes two seconds to run to the next tree and an axe can be repaired instantly.

Similarly with the mining, the most important I found was more ore, stones are everywhere.

The survival skill goes up slowly over the time you play, I don't think anything makes it go faster.
I found that maxing swimming out first was way more important, spend a few points on running but you won't die if you run out of steam on land. Diving for treasure is a lot harder and slower when you constantly have to jump on the rocks and wait, plus you might get stuck and die making the venture pointless.
You can also swim to other islands if you get stuck on them and to wrecks that appear nearby.
Food is everywhere in the game and won't slow you down to eat more so I wouldn't bother spending a point on that until you max the other two.

Crafting is a bit different, I maxed tool durability out first then reduced cost to make and then reduced cost to repair. Even with repair maxed out it makes very little difference but having the tool last longer does make a big difference, the cost to build will help later in the game when you have large amounts to make.

PVP, this is one that you will need at some point, you can upgrade by just mercilessly murdering other players or by having agreed upon fights. Up to you, it upgrades quickly to begin with but the benefits aren't really that much. I will say though, that if you don't upgrade it you will lose a fight nine times out of ten. But a good player can win without the upgrades.

It can be a bit slow upgrading but constant activity will have you there in no times.

The game still has a few glitches present, some are pretty bad, some just annoying.

One I came across was the sound bomb glitch, something about the voip in game can cause this really loud static noise and basically breaks the games audio.
I couldn't find a cure for it online so I messed around for a bit and found that verifying the game cache and restarting the computer fixed the audio.

It can be difficult to get the game started on some computers with a "cannot connect" message when trying to join a server.
As far as I am aware this is from a number of different problems.

One is that the game is very graphics intensive, if you aren't on a top of the line gaming pc then turn the graphics down in the initial menu screen and try again.

One is that an intel graphics chipset isn't compatible and needs a command line to get the game going, many pc's have these instead of a dedicated graphics card, dell computers are the worst for this. You can find the answer somewhere in the discussions forum search "can't connect".

Another is ping, if your ping is too high, as with many other games you will fail at the loading screen every time. If your ping is high enough you won't even make it to the menu screen.

The boats can get stuck, they seem to get stuck inside objects or scenery, if you find that you cannot move the boat at all or its not stuck in a player building that can be unbuilt, then don't bother with it. They are cheap to make and can be made on pretty much any island. Just throw a torch on it and walk away.

Some of the weapons accuracy is a bit off, the crossbow being one, build one and fire it at a tree. if it's accurate then good for you if it misses completely throw it away and don't bother with them until they update fix. The spears seem to fire to the right of the crosshair by about half a CM.
Most of the weaponry is accurate.

Cannons have no crosshair, but a way of gaining some kind of accuracy is to fire a shot and watch where it lands then re-aim the cannon, reload and fire again.

Pistols work similarly to bows, the drop rate isn't as bad and the damage is higher. The time it takes to reload is horrendous.
If you want to use one in a fight depending on how far away your opponent is....
If they are close, fire once and then swap to melee.
A good distance between you and them may allow you to get a second shot in but don't push it, you get stuck with the reload animation while they hack into you with a sword.

The dev team for this game seem to really care about their work, which is rare, so if you find something wrong or have a suggestion just send it through to them.
They aren't the "ban you for talking" kind of devs.