To make your first bed, and have some safety from the constant threat of losing everything, you need 3 leather and 3 planks. This is not as simple as it sounds on CivRealms. Please note despite the depressing tone of this post, it is intended as a tutorial, not a complaint.

Primitive Tools

1. You cannot punch trees for logs. You can break leaf blocks to get sticks, and you can craft planks from sticks (the vanilla plank to stick recipe is reversible). Use this to make your first crafting table.
2. You cannot find trees in every biome, and biomes are huge. So if you find yourself in a treeless area, start walking.
3. You cannot use planks to make wooden tools, or cobble to make stone tools. Instead primitive tools are crafted by using either bone or flint (but not both) along with sticks in the standard shaped tool recipe in the crafting table. They look and act mostly like stone tools from vanilla. Pickaxes, shovels, axes, swords, and hoes can be crafted in this way.
4. You cannot find gravel in every biome, so if you spawn in a biome without gravel, start walking.
   
5. You cannot rely on finding bones if ungeared, since you need to hunt or fish for bones. It'll be much easier to gather flint for tools than bone, which requires hunting or fishing. Fishing requires string, which generally involves killing spiders. However, you might be lucky enough to find 2 pieces of string randomly in the countryside from dead spiders.
6. You cannot chop trees without the risk of logs falling on you. Your primitive axe can chop the trees your fists could not, but watch out for falling logs when chopping trees, they become affected by gravity when one is broken nearby.

Mining

1. You cannot make leather without alum. Once you have primitive tools, you will need to find alum by mining. Alum uses the nether quartz texture, in both block and item form. You only need 1 piece for the recipe to craft leather from animal skins.
2. You cannot expect smoothstone to break on the first try. Stone only has a random chance to break with primitive tools. It will break by turning to cobble, which you then have to break again. Cobble also has a random chance to break (but more than stone), and is affected by gravity.
   
3. You cannot mine safely without being careful of falling rocks. Watch out for cave-ins while mining, they not only inflict damage but also nausea. Planks are never affected by gravity and can be used to create safe ceilings in your mine. Also, do not stand on smoothstone when it is converted to cobble, or you will twist your ankle for the same effect.
4. You cannot find ores more easily by searching caves, you will only see stone. Cobble and ores spawn via HiddenOres. Every time a block is broken, there is a random chance that nearby stone will become cobblestone, and a lower chance that nearby stone and cobblestone will become an ore cluster.
   
5. You cannot easily mine in a straight line. You should prefer to mine by digging out all the generated cobblestone first, as it is quicker and easier to break, even though it does not create a clean pattern.
6. You cannot smelt any of the ores you find yet, that requires expensive factories, so don't get excited about the iron you just found. If you can, hold onto it for use or (better yet) trading later.

Hunting

1. You cannot make leather without animal skins, which look like rotten flesh with special lore. The most reliable source for animal skins in the early game is going to be the hostile wolf spawns that occur in dark places throughout the world, including overland at night or in deep shade. You'll need 8 skins and 1 piece of alum for 4 leather.
2. You cannot tame these wolves easily. They always spawn in hostile to humans. They are also faster and stronger than vanilla wolves. Even with your primitive sword, they can be challenging to kill.
3. You cannot stand-and-click these wolves on level ground. Instead, you must take the high ground. One strategy (which is more dangerous) is to move backwards jumping up a slope, as they are slowed by climbing, while hitting them. Another strategy (that I enjoy) is to build a 2x2x2 cube of some block on level ground, and leave out one upper corner. When you see a wolf, carefully move close enough to aggro, then sprint back to your cube, climb on top, and place the missing block. Oh yeah...
4. You cannot place blocks directly beneath you, so you will have to stand firmly on the other 3 blocks of the cube to place that last block. Once completed, the wolf will keep aggro but cannot reach you up the two-block wall, so you are free to smack them as they jump at you until they are dead. Collect skins.
   

Other Survival Tips

1. You cannot wait for a farm to grow crops before starving. Crops take at least 2 real-world days to grow in ideal conditions, so be on the lookout for wild wheat, carrots, and potatoes. In some biomes, mushrooms may be a viable option. You can cook a single piece of wheat in an oven to make bread, rather than the 3-wheat recipe from vanilla. Oh, that reminds me...
2. You cannot make an oven using cobblestone. You have to use terracotta (color doesn't matter) instead, which spawns in large amounts in many biomes. However, it's not in every biome, so if you don't see it... yeah, start walking.
3. You cannot make a boat to get around more easily. Vanilla boats are very expensive, require a factory, and are meant to emulate large sailing vessels. Instead, swimming is intended to be analogous to using a canoe or small primitive boat. Which leads to...
4. You cannot swim if you have more than a few things in your inventory. Swimming restrictions are limited to 4 item stacks, and some single items (like armor or shears) are counted as a whole stack. Tools count as about 1/10th a stack each. If you are carrying too much, in (>2 block) deep water, you will be pulled downwards constantly and drown. Drowning damage is much higher than vanilla, and will kill you quickly.
5. You cannot suicide infinitely to randomspawn closer to somewhere you want to be. You have something called "stamina." Each time you die, you lose 0.75 stamina. If you get to zero, you are tempbanned. You start with 20 stamina. Each day you log in you gain 1 stamina. You also can get 2 extra per day from voting on minecraft-mp.com.

Is there no other way?

There is one thing you can do to make survival in the early game a lot easier. Join an existing group of players. Use the discord server, join in-game global chat with/nljg ! !, or /msg people in-game to find a group to join, and head that way. Established groups that are willing to take you in will be able to help you out with tools, food, and not least of all, an actual bed.

Just watch out for wolves.