Solo game tips?

[HeikoFennec]

So in going about things I've found that food is pretty harshly essential in the start, for calories sake. That said I'm also trying to not break the game or shoot myself in the foot by making unnecessary anythings as I go, least til I learn the game better.
And does it behoove me to go one route over another? Seems like I'd do well to get food and agriculture rolling for the sake of not wiping out those resources. Same token though I need to advance other areas to a forwards momentum.

[Other]

In solo play you will eventually get all the skills, but as you have seen, the order matters. I'm sure other people play the game differently than I do, so this is just one possible way to approach things:

- Until you get to the modern-era skills, it will probably take you more time to get the next star than to max out the previous skill, so for most of the early and mid game, you want to maximise your XP rate. The two components of that are food & housing, so when picking a new skill, ask yourself how much it will improve either or both of those, and pick the one that gives you your best total improvement. Pay attention to how things interlock, as well - as an example, Tailoring gives you nothing if you don't have gathering to process the flax & cotton into fibers, and another big chunk of the value of tailoring is locked behind the loom, which requires basic engineering to make a crucial part. Similarly, campfire cooking improves your food, but you need butchering and milling to get the best value from it.
- The first thing you should make once you have set up your campsite is a campfire (so that you can move up from raw food to charred food), but the first skill you should take is logging, since that is the best bump to your housing points for a single skill (although my calculations for that were on previous versions, and there is now a crude bed & latrine that don't need any skills to make, so it may have changed)
- don't worry too much about running out of resources, since it is very hard for a single person to wipe out a species even if they are trying (barring a few like creosote that sometimes start with population less than 5). However, do try to make sure when you are harvesting a group of plants that you leave some individuals from the group - if you harvest every single wheat plant in a cluster, it may never pop back up in that area, where if you take 8 out of 10, they should naturally repopulate over time. You can make that repopulation easier & faster if you wipe out everything else in a short radius around the remaining plants (maybe 5 tiles), so that potential new sprouts don't need to compete with grass or whatever. The same thing works for the plants that are not destroyed by harvesting - if you wipe out the salal in a section of forest, the huckleberry bushes will spread faster, and by day 3 or 5, you may have quite a dense patch.
- once you have a gathering skill, and enough storage space, you don't need to wait to get a processing skill to gather the materials you will need for it - once you have logging and some stockpiles, you can cut a bunch of trees, so that when you pick up carpentry, you just need to put in the orders for it, since you already have the logs. Similarly, once you have mining, you can go ahead and gather all the stone and ore you will need, you don't need to wait for smelting or pottery or masonry. This is less true for gathering, since most fruits & vegetables will eventually spoil, but fish and animal carcasses don't spoil (until you process them into raw fish & raw meat), so you can do all the hunting you will need as soon as you get the skill.
- early in the game, you will be doing lots of harvesting without having the relevant skill. usually all that does is make it take longer, and cost a few more calories, but neither of those is huge. Don't be afraid to take a bow & arrow & hunt turtles without the hunting skill, or cut a few trees without logging, or plant a field without farming. it isn't as efficient, but if you have done what you can with using the skills you have, getting a small quantity of resources now may be better than waiting for the skill.