HarryDresden wrote:I'd be doing much better if I had my rowboat day 1 and was able to forage to my hearts content.
You don't need to wait to be able to get tar from a tar kiln (and in fact you must grab some halfway to get the entire output of some loads). You can get tar faster by building more tar kilns. Going by wiki numbers, a single load of pine yields 2.5 liters of tar in 10.4 hours; with two tar kilns that's 5.2 hours, with four tar kilns it's 2.6 hours. Day 1 rowboats are certainly possible, just day 1 coal isn't.