a "warm" welcome

[Vilios]

my intial impression was that this game was fairly cool. i spent like 8 hours trying to find my friend and then another 2 looking for a good place to make a base. another 2 building the starts to a base, hid most things behind trees and went to bed.(didnt see a single person other then my buddy that entire time.) wake up went to work and got back a total 12 hours later, sign on.... everything is destroyed, nothing is left but a rune stone. on the stone is inscribed " Welcome to haven, where assholes destroy your shit while you sleep." sigh not quite back to square one but fairly close.

[Alubag]

I laughed when reading this thread, great job OP.

[Mernil]

Don't build your shit near rivers.
Also, get yeomanry (you or one of your friends) and claim your stuff.

[Mopstar]

You built that in a small amount of time,its not really that much to lose.

People lose entire towns and just pick up and start again.Your skills and stats matter more to be honest.

[min_the_fair]

So now you have discovered why it is a good idea to do things like:

Read the instructions about hearth secrets and how to spawn a new character close to the hearth of an existing one;
Keep your important possessions in your inventory when you log out;
Get yeomanry as fast as possible (you really don't need a house first);
Learn how to build palisades, and
Get a different client (Ender's, ApocLite, etc) and press [ctrl]+[h]. Suddenly, all the trees disappear and you can see all the things hidden behind them! Also press [ctrl]+[n] and the darkness is also gone (and caves have maps, but you probably don't care about that yet).

Regarding learning how to buld palisades, this is a mature world. It is full of decaying properties with unclaimed palisades (and brick walls, but that is likely to be beyond you for a little while). Rather than scrabbling around trying to hold onto ropes and bone glue, it's a lot easier (once you've discovered said rope and bone glue, anyway) to find a damaged palisade and rebuild it without starting from scratch. That way you avoid using quite so many trees or indeed killing so many chickens (well that's a lie, you'll probably want to kill the chickens anyway because they are tasty). But yeah, trees. Save the planet! Save carbon! And also cutting trees is incredibly boring!

Get a fullscreen client and it'll become a lot easier to find properties in your price range. If you're lucky, you may even find an actual house available instead of just the crumbling foundations.

[factnfiction101]

Eat all of the blueberries you can.
Alt vault your leather, bone glue, etc...
and what others have mentioned

Square one is when all of your characters die and you have no pclaims. No sliders moved, etc...

[vatas]

Stealth is greatest asset for newbie. Not as in the incremental skill, it is pretty much useless to increase it if you are new player. But in settling away from river or at least to dead end of a river. If you make camp on shore anybody who boats past it is tempted to mess your unclaimed stuff. Also after eventually getting black skills for criminal acts use them with extreme caution as the scents you leave can be used to kill you. If you have palisade coverign house where you have your Hearth Fire inside you are safe from forced summoning unless player tracking you has access to palibasher or builds ram and you fail to check against it.

You need to do lots of reading in guides and wiki if you want to be succesfull in this game but in the end it is worth it.

[Dunner]

To add to min_the_fair's point about finding an abandoned plot, there is a large abandoned village not very far from where I live. It has deteriorated to the point that I could walk in, repair the hole in the wall and claim it to slow the decay. I've been picking it clean for about a month but it's still a massive head start compared to starting completely fresh, with stone mansions, fields of crops, orchards of trees, a cave, ovens, kilns, smelters. Everything needs repairs but that'll take a fraction of the materials needed to build from scratch.

It is NOT secure; original gates still remain, it's only palisaded, but it's yours if you want it and probably would make a good place to start to learn. If you take it up I'll help you set up a village idol and then remove my personal claim, maybe help you remove the original gates. PM me if you want to take a look at it all on a new char.

[Vilios]

wow such an active forum, i love it thank you all for the advice. me and my gf were smart enough not to be near a river, we have however picked up and moved to a fairly large thicket. we have spent the last few hours plowing out an area to use as a base, were both about 500 lp away from yeomanry once we have that we will be building the walls, is there anything else we should consider doing to fortify our little base?

[Dunner]

Read through Sevenless's guide; it's good.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19114

The only thing I'd add is when you're ready to start building your palisade, map it out first with the cheap and destroyable round pole fences. Mistakes with palisades will be really difficult to fix. Once you've got your palisade up you're as set as you can be for now. Next thing to aim for would be a village idol so you can trade or a brick wall for ultimate security.