You start out Windrose with nothing much, but following the tutorial you will quickly build a base and a workbench, crafting your first tool. As soon as you have a stone axe, I recommend doing a shipwreck beach tour around your starting island. The idea is to do a complete tour around the island, to see where is what; and at the same time use your axe on every crate and piece of shipwreck you see. Hitting shipwrecks with an axe is more efficient for wood gathering than hitting trees with an axe, as the trees you first need to fell, and then hit again. Also the shipwrecks sometimes drop nails, which you can't make before you found copper. You can then use the wood and nails to build the treasure chest shaped storage, which is bigger than the storage bags you can make without nails.\

Before heading into the interior of the island, you might want to build a first hut. A bed is useful to skip the night to avoid stumbling around in the dark and roaming undead. Even more useful is decoration: Every different type of decoration (as in a chair and a table, not two chairs, only trophies stack) increases comfort by one. And the higher the comfort of your base, the longer the rested buff lasts.

When exploring an island and finding useful stuff like clay, peppers, or potatoes, take the time to go to your map and right click on your location to mark the spot. The resources respawn, and you will want to be able to find those vegetables again.

When you find the copper mine on your island, go there with an empty inventory, except for a stack of wood. You will want to build a lot of stand-up torches in that mine, for 2 wood each. Copper respawns after something like 6 hours real time, but the torches you placed stay. Having completely lighted the mine will make your next copper run a lot easier. Note that for later mines the same is true for scaffolding you might want to build to reach ore spots that are too high to reach from the floor. Fun fact: The ore respawns around stuff you built, so if you build a torch where some ore was, the spot will be dark at first, but light up as soon as you mined the ore around the torch.

There are three basic game loops in Windrose: The first is the xp / level game loop. This trips some people up, because you can actually play for hours without making a single xp. Neither killing mobs, nor sinking ships, nor gathering resources, nor crafting or building gives xp. The only things that give xp are quests and fully exploring locations on islands. At first all locations on islands are marked with question marks, until you approach them. Then either it is a mine, which doesn't give xp, or another location with some number under it, e.g. 0/3. That means you need to find 3 chests at that location, and when you do you get xp, and the number turns into a green checkmark.

The second game loop is your gear. You can craft some basic gear at the start, but things start to get interesting once you find rare "blue" gear randomly in chests. The trick is that you can then upgrade that gear, whether it is weapons, armor, or even ship equipment like guns or hull bracing. Just go to the upgrade tab of your respective specialized workbench (which needs to be under a roof) and see what resources you need to upgrade. That will generally be wood, copper, or rough hide, which you get from killing boars and sows. Every enemy, monster or ship, has a level; and if you attack with a weapon which has a much lower level than the enemy, you won't do very well. In the first part of the game you will want to have blue weapons and armor fully upgraded to level 5 before tackling the end of chapter boss.

The third game loop kicks in as soon as you repaired, equipped and crewed your "bigger boat", the Ketch. Sinking enemy ships gives some loot and insignias; boarding ships with a glowing chest icon floating on top of them gives additional money (piastres, a silver coin). At some point in the game, following quests, you will meet the various factions of the game. For each faction you can hand in insignias at the bounty hunter for reputation; then with the right level of reputation you can pay your silver for useful stuff, like armor blueprints, merchants you can set up in your base, or rare resources. Gold coins are used to buy blueprints for building nicer stuff.

Note that before you head out to visit other islands, you should build a fast travel bell at your base, and bring a bell to build a fast travel point on the new island. Advanced tip: When building a fast travel bell, a wharf, or any foundation, use Z plus mouse wheel to adjust the height to align it with the ground level. That way you can walk onto it, instead of having to jump on it every time.

Feel free to post any tips you want to share in the comments.