It's a very different experience to 13 now!
Some things are the same, others are very different, but the basic useful things I've found are;
Early game - avoid combat with boars and predators. They're lethal. The tutorial quests are okay, but don't encourage you to make the best early stuff;
Cokked food fills you more, but has a chance of food poisoning (bad, but short lived, you throw up and have to eat again) - boiled water can give you disentery (VERY bad - cured by Goldenrood tea) - cureing things, including infection, now take time; so no mroe insta cures.
Make a stone sledgehammer and practice with it. Make a few stone spears and practice throwing them - 1 on 1 or in small groups you'll find the stone hammer and spears more useful than the early bow / clubs. Bow is okay for Deer, rabbits and chickens, but not much else.
Finding a (any) early base is vital - the smaller the better; you won't find many big wandering hordes or get too much attention early on - so something small for your bedroll, campfire and easily barricaded is best. Wood spikes are sufficient to defend it's exterior.
Crafting is a lot less useful early on - you'll find significantly better stuff than you can make unless you really specialize - but getting the ability to make Goldenrod tea and Bacon and Eggs is worthwhile. A forge is not as vital as it always was - you're not going to be making Iron or steel tools for some time; and will find better ones than you can make. The most useful thing you can use the forge for now early on would be repair kits - they'll keep the stuff you find in top shape and will make it more valuable to sell when fully repaired.
Workstations are okay, but Chem stations are better - glue is important for making duct tape for making repair kits. It takes murky water and bones - bones are rare now - so finding a Chem station to use is valuable - all traders had forges, workstations, chem stations and cement mizers - but they wont always be functional - try to find a schematic asap for the chem station, and if you find a working one in the world mark it on your map and USE it!
Use the traders. The vending machines will get you some decent canned food - which is SAFEST (no risk of food poisoning) - and the food and drink they sell is much cheaper than what the traders themselves sell. Sell stuff to trader, and buy things you know you want or need - especially schematics and books - getting good recipes, schematics and books early can really help, and not finding them can really hurt.
Loot. Stick to smaller buildings early - the bigger the building the higher the 'tier' - higher tiers have more and tougher zombies in them. All POI's are now dungeons - some small others massive. The 'path' through them should be fairly obvious - any planted lights tend to point you in the direction you are 'supposed' to go. You can skip ahead by nerd pole, but this may cause sudden unexpected spawns around you, so be careful. Some POI's are straight forward, others will have collapsing floors dropping you into gauntlets - so get practising on your combat and how to heal. most buildings will loot stashes at the end of them - generally a gun stash, and ammo stash, a food stash and some medicine stashes in each building; so you ought to be able to get some decent stuff even from small POIS.
Use Traders. They offer you QUESTS - quests are tiered too - lower tier quests will send you to smaller and easier jobs, but the rewards scale with the difficulty. FETCH quests and BURIED SUPPLIES are best early on as they'll be relatively quick, and can give you good stuff. CLEAR and FETCH AND CLEAR quests are more involved, tougher and more time consuming, but reward you with more stuff.
Farming. Very different - you need to craft farming blocks - requiring some rarer stuff. It takes more plants to make seeds than before, and you need the recipes to make em - farming is still good, but it's gonna take a long while to get it to the point you can live off of it - so much of your food and medicine will have to rely on looting, questing and trading early on.
Perks - you need to spend skill points to get better at stuff - and it's most effective to focus on specific things. Some perks increase your abilities, some increase your crafting level, some unlock new recipes. Be advised you can find ALL recipes out in the world, so I would only use points to get them if you REALLY need them right now. Crafting skill perks are okay, as long as you know you're gonna use them - but abilities are probably best - things that make specific guns / melee weapons are very good going forward.
I highly recommend putting one point into healing factor regardless, as a free slow healing is always useful.
try out everything you find, and if specific weapons work well for you consider specializing and spending your perks to improve them. Read what all the perks do and think about it - you CAN reset your skill points later with a 'forgetting Elixir' - but it's expensive; so best avoided if you can help it.
DON'T panic - there's been a LOT of changes, so play a few games to test it out, have a look around and check out some of the youtubers to get you back up to speed.
base building - very different fish now - generally resources are harder to get, things more expensive to make, and zombies designed to knock it down - but there are also lots of new things to help you; junk turrets, electric fences, metal spikes, auto turrets, land mines and LOTS more guns and ammo to be found; although this may change as they develop - but no more invincible passive bases, it seems.
Zombies DIG now.
Vehicles
Vehicles are cool as you would imagine, but have been made harder to get. a Bicycle is very good though for early game, so try and get / make / buy / find one as soon as you can.
Explore, try stuff out, don't get discouraged, the core of the game is still there - once you've got the hang of the new melee weapons, found a handgun and got some decent armour you'll feel right at home.
I recommend the PREGEN 01 map as a nice starter for this alpha.
