Picked this up just recently and trying to get into it.
Ah, hey! Welcome to the game. I've found it a lot of fun, if a bit buggy.
I'd say the most important piece of advice I can give you is to play around with Feng Shui early on, especially since there's a fair number of inaccuracies in the guides I've read. The Observatory unlocks the moment you establish your sect (that is, raise your first Inner) and gives you most of the important information; build it and figure out what works for you. And watch out for materials changing the local temperature. That can be a killer.
Oh, right. And always adopt the puppy. (Adopt
all the animals. But especially the puppy.) Otherwise you're going to be real sad when a cultivator attacks your sect while all of your Inners are out adventuring.
Worker tools - I'm not sure how much effect these have. As far as I know, pick material and quality doesn't do anything for, say, Mining Yield. What
will help is sticking Diligence, Spiritual Travel, and Spiritual Cleansing talismans on all your outers - they'll work faster, move faster, and sleep less.
The "Manual Guard" perk starts you with instructions for Diligence and Cleansing, plus some other useful ones, like Fertility - which improves crop and butchering yields, at least for outers. Cleansing and Travel will show up in the first few weeks even if you don't take it, though. The manual is less useful for your cultivators; it
mostly just lets you get more out of your outer disciples.
Adventuring can basically start
immediately; that Foundation Pill you start with is meant to be used, not saved. You're not going to be getting another one for a long while, but it's not really a
valuable item.
On reincarnators: Custom Reincarnators can be made in the Realms Palace main menu option.
It's possible to recruit a bunch of outer disciples by immediately raising an Inner and sending them to camp at and enter the nearby sites; all of them have villages and some useful loot to steal. Chat with the locals, if you can get them to 60 favor you can invite them back to your sect. 30 from chatting, the rest by telling them things about random cultivators. Mortals aren't generally picky about
which cultivators, and occasionally know a fact or two you can tell the next guy - click on each of the other sects on the world map first before you enter to make sure their sect leaders are available to chat about. (Mt Fullmoon's village might lock your favor gains to +1 the first time you go there. If so, just skip it, maybe come back later, or not.) The recruits will show up in a few days and can be talked into staying permanently with 100% odds. They're not generally Reincarnator quality, but you don't really need to start off with 5 reincarnators if you're not trying something cheaty.
You can also just send your cultivators on adventures to any city to get recruits that way, but the quality is a lot more variable. That said, early on you'll probably be sending junk Outers off as abbots for agencies, anyway - you'd rather not waste potential Inners on that duty.
What I generally recommend for starting characters would be a) someone with
good social to get Primordial Talismans Law, b) someone with enough Perception(/Int/Luck) to reach 60+ crafting (crafting is
real easy to grind, you don't need to start with 60+; just make sure the stats mentioned average out to at least 5, perception counts double), and however many extras with decent Qi sense and other stats you feel like taking. The Hedonism perk gives your primary dude +2 Cha and +5 ranks of Social, which can be a
real help if you want a decent socialite and don't want to be rerolling forever. Otherwise, Kitty Yaoguai generally have 9 or so Cha and can start with
very high ranks in social, but playing around with Yaoguai isn't really recommended until you know what you're doing with human cultivators. The shapeshifting tribulation is no joke.
I've never found food to be a serious issue.
Maybe if you sold too much to the merchants you might need to adventure for the stuff. Getting enough brownstone can be a pain early, but the Ruins of the Taiyi Sect can be accessed by day 2 if you know what you're doing (there's a gate to be found in Mt. Fullmoon if you enter, watch out for the beasts) and they've got a
fuckton of marble blocks. For other resources, watch out for wood and brownstone long term, mostly wood: it's easy to get early, but building agencies requires a
lot of it, and once you've stripped your sect of the stuff wood doesn't come back quickly, and brownstone requires using miracles to get more of. There's an easy source of both, but the source in question is
agencies, so if you set them up wrong and then run out of the resources to fix them with you're going to be unhappy.
Most other resources can be adventured for, once you've figured out where to get them. Don't worry about, say, running out of Igneocopper ore on your sect map - just buy access to Mt. Shu and adventure there to get size 40+ stacks of the stuff. Access is pretty cheap - 200 spiritstones should be well within your price range after the first merchant. You'll need to give the sect leader a gift to open relations; I'm pretty sure gifting a single spirit stone will never punish you. Money can be made... a
lot of ways, but be warned if you want to barter with other sects they're not as interested in bulk goods as the merchants are. They'll generally trade for masterwork spiritstone bows, though.
Experiment with entering maps. (Camp, then hit the enter button for the location.) Most places have a
lot of interesting loot. Taiyi Sect's marble blocks, Mt. Coppertomb always has a large stack of darksteel ore, there's pretty much always
something. If you aggro a beast in the process, just hit the "run away" button and get enough distance and they'll usually stop chasing you.
