Stoneshard Beginners Basics Guide ~ The Leet Guides

So you've just cleared the prologue dungeon and you're ready for adventure uh? Here's a bunch of things you should know:

You can only save the game in Inns and camps with an interactable bed, so plan your exploration trips accordingly
Sometimes there are multiple ways to interact with objects, don't forget to right click to see the options!
Replenish food and water whenever you can, to refill your water supply right click on on any source of water and you'll get both a drink and a refill option.
Remember that you can heal by resting, right click on yourself and select rest!
Keep a look at your HP bar, if you can't heal all your HP back because the bar looks capped before the max level you have one or more body parts that need to be treated with balms, leeches or other healing items
LOOK AT YOUR MAP! You should have a map in the inventory, I missed it my first time around and spent more time I'm comfortable admitting roaming around getting ganked by bears and wolves. The map doesn't tell you where you are, use roads and other unique places to figure out where you are if you get lost.If for any reason you drop or sell the map you can buy another one from the elder. You can now access the map by pressing M.
Always travel diagonally in the overworld when you can. The map is divided in squares, so by traveling diagonally you travel x1.7 times faster than going in a straight line (it's math!) by going at the corner of a screen you can easily travel to the next diagonal screen by going left/right one screen then immediately up/down the other screen. Traveling following the screen borders is also safer.
Where's the damn elder? He's on the first floor of the barrack, the biggest building in the village, the ones with guards on the ground floor. Talk with him and take both jobs, you can switch the active quest in the quest menu.
Stay away from bears at the beginning (level 1-2), they're OP.
Don't forget to visit the herbalist in the village and buy splints, bandages and balms, you'll need them!

Advanced tips
After you complete a quest the dungeon will lock and you'll be unable to visit the place anymore (very weird design decision if you ask me!), that means that you can't go back to the place of the quest to gather all that sweet loot you couldn't carry the first time around. There's a workaround for this though: you don't need to accept a quest to complete it, you can talk to the elder, figure out where the quest is and what involved and you can visit the place and even do several runs to clean it up, then you can accept the quest and instantly complete it or go back for a final run to finish it. You can do what I'd call "scout runs" and get to know the place and the enemies strength well before doing the actual quest.

Basic survival

Health and Injuries

The HP bar not only shows your current HP, but also if any part of your body is currently injured. This is displayed by the fact that the bar doesn't fully extend to the end. When this happens, open the Character panel (C), go to Health and check the status of your body parts.

Leeches and Healing salves are the main way of dealing with minor injuries and restore your max HP threshold but sometimes you'll break a limb in battle, in that case you'll need a splint or even surgery. Always carry healing salves, bandages and a splint with you when going on a quest.
To perform one of these actions right click on the injured part and select the action from the dropdown menu:

Use a bandage to recover from bleeding.

A splint is the best way to restore a broken body part, it can also heal up by itself with time but you'll possibly end up wasting several

If you have a broken limb and you're out of splints you'll start suffering from Strong Pain, you'll be severely debuffed and your character can even start moving on random tiles. it's better to rush at the nearest village and visit the herbalist to buy a splint and some balms, then sleep for few hours to recover. Don't adventure in dungeons of multiple floors without a splint and something to soothe the pain!

Hunger and Thirst

There's nothing worse than going on a grand adventure just to die of hunger or thirst on the first floor of a dungeon.
Stoneshard has various "resistance" stats and one of the most important ones is Hunger Resistance. This stat changes the rate of gaining Hunger. Some items increase this value, others diminish it. Keeping a high hunger resistance is key so you should prefer to buy food that not only satiate your hunger but also increase your hunger resistance. The most common one is venison meat as you can easily hunt and craft it yourself (see the hunting section).

You can replenish your waterskin at any source of water by right clicking on it

Hunting and cooking

While hunting is not the main focus of the game it's something you can do to gather meat and some coin. It's best done with a ranged weapon but melee hunting is also possible.

Hunting

The best places are the denser forest areas, to approach your prey you need to be out of their line of sight as much as possible and try to close the distance, this will allow you to attack multiple times while they try to escape so once you see an animal use tree and rocks to stay hidden and not alert your prey.
If you don't have a bow, the Mutilating Lunge skill of the Axe can still be an effective way of closing the distance with a fleeing prey while dealing damage to it.
The easiest way to hunt something if you are close to the edge (or even better the corner) of the map chunk is to lead your prey to it, only NPCs that are aggroing you will exit the sector, ones that are fleeing are trapped inside (at least in the current version of the game) so you can very easily close the distance and kill them off. Cheesy but effective.
Shout technique: hide behind a tree and shout 3 times (right click on yourself, then shout). This works as a "hunting call", and activates all the mobs nearby.

Items

Venison meat: In the current version both Deer and Moose drop venison meat -30% raw, can cause poisoning or vomiting when raw. When cooked goes up only to -40% Hunger but adds -15% Hunger resistance, a very useful stat that slows hunger down

Deer Hide

Deer Antlers

Moose Hide

Moose Antlers

Fox Pelt

Rabbit Pelt

Wolf Pelt

Boar Hide

Cooking

Cooking is extremely simple, you just need to find a fire or a place that can host one, right click on it and select cook. This will cook one item in your inventory, open the inventory and select it multiple time to cook all your meat.

Trading

You can buy and sell from almost any NPC in the game, some NPCs are more interested in certain types of items than others and will pay more for them, try to write down a list of prices and npcs to optimize your trading routines. The most common things you can sell at the start are pelts, hides (see Hunting) and weapons and clothes you'll loot from brigands:

Smiths and Weapon Merchants are a good place to sell weapons

Tailor Usually the best place to sell pelts and hides

Herbalist Invaluable place were to buy your stock of splints, bandages and balms

Carpenter often offer the best price on certain objects (possibly the ones made of wood), so check out his prices when you're not happy with what the smith or the merchants offer

Herbs and Fungi

Tips

The most useful plant I've seen so far is Mindwort as it removes bad trip/drunk status effects so it's great when used in combo with alcoholic beverages.
All these items are listed as "ingredients" but there's no crafting/potion making yet in the game, so for the moment they're just consumable items.
Herbs take a lot of space in the inventory so they're not that useful to carry around, but during long trips they can help surviving fights and recovering faster afterwards as most of them have sedative properties. There will be probably be more to them once they implement crafting.