This game is a bit of a grind especially if you have no idea what your doing from the start.

Here are some tips I learned and will help to make it easier to level up and cut down the grinding a bit by crafting the right things and using your skill points on the right pathway to begin with.

Basics:
Water and food, blue bar is water (click the + sign to drink) food is the brown bar select food item in your inventory "I" key if you have a food item select it and click use. (Water can be found at spawn points and other places on the map at blue barrels just interact with them to drink or fill your Bota Bag "Water Bottle".) Red bar is health and orange is energy (this will drop down over time and only rejuvenate half way etc meaning you need to sleep to do this place a shelter and interact with it to sleep.
A lot of the screens where you use items you can drag and drop items across by clicking the hexagon icon and dragging it.

First do the Pre Tutorial, Prologue, To the Surface & A Gift of Gratitude quests. Then go out to Bob for the Teachings of Bob the Buidler and skip the his tutorial if you like because all he teaches you is very basic how to interact really where eveything is "E" key and gives you options anyway.

These are the various basic materials.

Trees: you can interact by either selecting
1. Cut (which is a 2 stage process, first to chop down tree, then work the fallen log to gather logs and branches out of container left on ground 2 logs, 3 branches).
2. Collect fruit
3. Collect branches (gives you 10 branches per tree)
(Leave shelter door and turn right, run through the valley turn right and head east through the refugee camp and you will see a hut and a group of trees which is an orchard where there are multiple trees to chop).
(Best place for tree harvesting is Oak Creek Canyon)
(There is a current known bug which is being worked on by the devs. You may chop a tree watch it fall but another one appears right away, but there is a fallen log on the ground which you may be able to chop but not the standing tree, work it once then sometimes you can see the container to get logs and branches sometimes you cant. If this happens just best to move to another tree and dont waste time on it.)
*** When you first start always do the 3 actions gather branches, collect fruit then cut tree. You will need as many of each of these items as you can get to level up faster***

Ore Deposits:
1. Gather stone (gives you one stone per deposit)
2. Pick (gather various different minerals and stone.
(Leave shelter door and turn right there are 3 deposits within 50 metres work around clockwise back around to the shelter entrance and you will get plenty).

Cloth Piles: these look like piles of rags on the ground interact with them to gather scrap cloth.
(Go to the Motel for the biggest cloth piles. You can also get cloth scrap and cloth from the cars near Bob on the highway).

UGC: is the in game currency, you will need to gather this if you want to start a city later or trade goods via the market.
Where money is found.
1. In wallets found in cars.
2. By killing bandits which also drop wallets on their corpse once you kill them. (they are found up far north on Lost highway map or various other locations like the bridges on Oak Creek Canyon.
(go to your inventory and use wallets to recover UGC from them).

Character Advancement: ("C" key)
many options here but first you want to level up your speed, condition because you run out of stamina real fast and it will drive you crazy (run 50 metres and have to stop and regain energy). Then attack strength is most important as well.

Skills & Abilities ("T" key)

Quests:
There are many quests a couple of them are bugged and have errors which are being worked on but most work fine and take a bit of thinking to complete. I know for sure the Serum quest is not working so dont bother with that one. There are two others that I'm having trouble with just waiting for devs to get back with a reply to see if the problem is me or the quest.

To activate most quests talk to the main people in the shelter like
Sgt Martin (near exit), Gertrude (Canteen), Capt Harris (Headquarters) Kolzak (warehouse desk), Andre (gatekeeper), Dr Haruoka (Hospital), Bob the builder (on the highway next to truck, run stright out from shelter door).
Most of the other quests activated by other people around the map (Oak Creek Canyon, Yuma etc). The simplest and easy ones are at The Lost Highway area. just check the map "M" key and scroll in to zoom in and find points of interest houses etc and go to those to activate more quests. If you head to the spawn point closest to Bob and head for an are 45 degrees to the right you will see a group of green trees, go there enter the gates and do the Merricks pig quest which is easy, find his three pigs which are all dead on the ground close by his farm next to rock faces.

Cities: (Map "M" key)
To start a city. (This is not important yet, work on levelling up first)
1. First you have to create an organization you need 1500 UGC to do this. (press P, select organizations, create new organization).
2. You then need 3 city coins for which you need to do a quest for Bob called "Trustworthy" which you need to go see Martin, Gertrude and Dr. Haruoka and ask then to vouch for you, but for them to do that you must complete a few quests for them in return.
3.Then return to Bob for "The supplier" quest and once completed he will give you 1 city coin. You can then repeat the quest once every 24 hours to gain another coin each time.
4. Once you have 3 city coins then you need to teleport to another map location via a spawn point and search for an empty city plot (these can be seen on the map as a square with a city icon on them). Once you find one go to the plot hologram and select start city.
5: Locations for starting a city. Tohomo Mountains, Hunters Plateu, Willow Swamp, Mountain Pass, Havusa Falls, Red Mesa, Devils Crack, Riverfall & Lakeshire.