I'm coming back to the game after a hiatus of numerous years, like 2017 I think. Jesus fuck this is frustrating.

I USED to be good at this game, but I cannot survive the early game anymore. Food pressure requires constant nomad lifestyle, crafting everything takes multiple nights, I can never find enough string for more than 1 or 2 new stone tools per day, and I have to carry everything in my inventory because I have no fucking storage. I'm discarding awesome loot like early random leathers, iron armor, spider eyes, witchworts, slimeballs, because I can't fucking carry it all. If I don't kill every animal on sight, I lose it to mobs overnight, and if I DO kill them all, my inventory overflows. Oh, and the only source of sinew is cows, which are impossible to kill and it takes all night to craft a single strand.

I can EITHER keep moving, HOPE I can fashion a new hidey hole every night and MAYBE find enough food; or, instead, I can craft and work toward advancing my tech. Even if I lay out bricks to dry for an oven, I can't afford to come back to retrieve them because I need to keep finding un-killed animals for food.

So many changes! And early game food is a LOT more punishing now. Used to be that renewable food was fairly achievable, with some luck:

• crafting tables were craftable without iron
• stone tools were craftable without string
• stone pickaxes yielded raw cobblestone, full coal, and full iron-ore blocks
• stone axes yielded wood planks
• furnaces would cook food and smelt ores
• furnaces were craftable with cobblestone-only
• stone axes yielded pumpkin seeds from wild pumpkins
• 2 iron ingots yielded a hoe
• your first hoe meant you could plant pumpkin seeds
• pumpkin seeds, by themselves, would lure chickens
• your first single chicken, by itself, would yield a single egg per day that it gets fed
• eventually that egg would yield your second chicken
• torches were all permanent, and self-liighting, with regular coal

Thus, your first day was to make a hidey hole to survive the night; your second day was spent slaughtering all the nearby wildlife and chopping trees; second night was spent mining cobblestone after crafting 2 or 3 storage chests; third day was spent collecting fallen tree saplings, seeking surface-exposed coal and iron, prolly finding a wild pumpkin; third night was spent cooking the rest of the raw food, smelting iron, crafting 1 or 2 torches; fourth day was spent building a small shitshack holding pen for your starter chickens; as soon as you'd mined 18 iron nuggets (which could legit take a few days) you had your first hoe. More than 50% of the time, your original food supply from the second day would last, if you were careful, without needing to venture outward to find new animals to kill before you had your chicken coop built, at which point you were going mainly to find a chicken to bring back and not necessarily to hunt them. Then after your first chicken was fed and at home, THAT is when you went on your first official hunting trip to get more food to last the few days it took to spin up your pumpkin crop and your chicken population. After your second batch of food is cooked, your time at base was mostly spent digging and building a larger mob-proofed garden and chicken coop. You transfer the chickens to the new structure with eggs and slaughtering the original ones, not by actually moving the birds one by one.