To save time, lets get started.
When you start out you will need to keep moving, the game ticks your hunger counter down every few minutes until you starve. As you get more hungry your maximum stamina also reduces, making it harder to run away from a bigger enemy. So move as efficiently as possible until you have a lot of food available, something which won't happen until you get to chapter 3.
You have limited storage available to you to begin with. So do NOT collect food, eat it on the spot or leave it there and make a mental note of the location. Additionally, food kept in storage goes bad over time.

The game has no maps (except for treasure maps)
A rare treasure map.

1. Strong Grass : Builds your first boat, and good for restarting fires
   
2. Sticks : Your first fire. Arrows, and a basic spear.
   
3. Stones : For making a safe fire
   
4. Palm fronds : Make a container that sits on the deck of your boat
   
5. Bamboo : Your first decent boat.
   
6. Bone and Bleek Fronds : Kill those cute things that keep hiding in the burrow. Better arrows (don't loose these.)
   
7. Gloomharrow Skin : Kill one of the overweight pterodactyl like creatures for these. A camouflage bag or hood to boost your stealth.
   
8. Leather : Drops on killing the larger creatures. Requires a drying rack to craft. Use to upgrade your mast, make bags, masks and much more.
   
9. Clay : A random find, can be used to make potions

Early in the game your options for hoarding items are limited, you can later on make a better pouch or bag, but that's it. One bag per sailor allowed only. Seafarers travel light by necessity.
Small islands with no landing beach may still hold gems or other treasures!

Sometimes it's not possible to land at a beach. If you have an anchor, simply dive off the deck and circle an island looking for a low spot you can climb. Note that being in sea water saps your stamina!

Aside from fluttercup mushrooms that grow on tree trunks, raw meat once cooked, is your best food source initially. You need to attend to the fire to cook meat. Cooked meat can be converted to jerkey for better shelf life. It's not worth converting cooked meat to jerkey until you have more than you can eat. At that point, a drying rack will let you continue exploring while it cooks up to 3 items (including leather tanning) at once, without having to attend to the fire.

This jerkey has only just started to go off

Leaving cooked meat or Jerkey in the drying rack will not let it go off.

Once you build a grass boat and collect some palm fronds, you can place a container on the deck. Before you can even do that, you will want to craft a sail, your first burst of speed.
Note that the container is useless to you if you die even on the easy mode if the boat does not have an anchor. It's wise to craft an anchor first.
Once you have the resources to upgrade, it's tempting to scrap the old boat. Don't scrap your old boat until you have emptied the container on deck.
Perhaps the most annoying part of embarking on a journey is accidentally opening the deck container when you want to just get sailing and not drift back into the beach. Be sure that the "sail" text appears not "interact".

You play as Kara, who has been separated from her fleet during a storm and has to survive and find a way home. You’ll build your boat and sail from island to island, learning more about the people who used to call the archipelago home and the ancient magical presence beneath the waves.

I wonder if this undersea vent holds any kind of clues?

A non scary teleporter...not!
The game chapters each unlock another mural which the player "unveils" at the end of the chapter before teleporting into another randomly generated part of the forgotten archipelago.

Each chapter gives Kara new "boons" bestowed by the sea witch, and a batch of survival skills.
In chapter 3 you will eventually need to kill to survive, even though many larger hostile creatures on the archipelago can be avoided by stealth. Creatures yield a lot of resources that will help you stay alive.

Although you don't have a lot of time to loiter in game unless you are playing photo mode, it's not a bad plan to find any high up vantage points, and scan for resources and nearby islands. With the exception of the Chapter 1 starting islands, each playthrough of a chapter will be different. Once again, there are no actual maps. You are going to have to use your wits.

Even though Windbound is a very simplistic sailing simulation, knowing a few physics rules from sailing a real dingy still do apply in game. Sailing a grass hull boat will not get you far very fast, which means starting out is pretty hard going until you can get hull upgrades.
Wind: Wind pushes against the sail, that that would be as simple as it gets if we only ever want to go where the wind wants you to go. The game does not often require you to sail against the wind, but I'll explain how to quickly.
1. When the wind is directly behind you we call that a RUN, that one is simple.
2. When you want to go a little way off from the wind direction, or at 90 degrees to the wind, that is called a BROAD REACH
3. When you want to sail slightly into the wind direction, that is called a CLOSE REACH
4. Finally we have want to sail into the wind, we simple CANNOT.

Plain sailing, you are likely to hit your maximum speed this way, the achievement for speed can be gotten only once you have upgraded the boat significantly though. Always try to present as much sail as possible to the wind, mostly this means holding the sail 90 degrees to the wind direction... mostly.

Try to angle the sail so that it gives all of it's surface to the wind and catches as much of it as possible. The game does not accurately model things from this point onwards, because your grass boat does not have a keel, and only a small rudder (a magical rudder it must be noted). Sailing at an angle to the wind requires that the wind be pushing the hull (which is attached to your sail) and the water providing resistance. Imagine for a moment a gentle breeze and nobody controlling the boat, it will tend to just drift downwind.
Once we tighten the sail enough to catch some of that breeze, the pressure of the water from one side increases enough and pushes the boat forward because of the hull angle, basically doing a diagonal slice. So at this point you need to be doing what we call trimming sail. You are pulling in the sail a bit so that it presents as much area as possible to the wind, but while still keeping your heading. In a real boat the exact position of the mast will determine how much twisting force is applied to the hull and thus how much rudder action you need, but our magical ancestral rudder removes this complication for us. Wind direction changes constantly in game, and the wind does tend to push your nose around, so stay alert.
Now taking what we learned from the broad reach, it makes sense that if we can get the wind to create enough pressure against the hull side, we can start to angle the boat into the wind and still make headway. At this point the game slightly falls apart, since the grass boat's hull is not actually a large enough surface to generate the forces we need....but we have a magical rudder. So we are fine. Normally a dingly or yacht has a deep keel, an extension of the hull, that goes below the water level. The deeper, (or larger), the hull and keel are, the more pressure you can create, and thus the closer into the wind you can sail. Boats with no deep keel or centerboard cannot sail very far into the teeth of the wind. Other problems also start to occur the more you aim upwind. But this is a game so let's not get into details that don't exist in game. but, it may also help to imagine that the wind escapes or spill off of the back edge of the sail when you are sailing CLOSE in. As opposed to the broad reach where the sail is almost acting like a spinnaker (those huge balloon sails we sometimes see in races,) just try imagine catching as much air as you can on a broad reach, but on a close reach you are using the hull (keel) angle to move the boat forward, not the sail.

The wind in Windbound never stops blowing, but it does change direction. So if the boat is not moving you are doing one of 2 things wrong. The first is the boat is possibly aimed upwind, and second the sail is not trimmed. Always trim fully (pull in) when you want to pull off from the beach.

If your destination is directly upwind of you, aim about 45 degrees to the right of the destination, and sail until an imaginary 90 degree line over your left shoulder finally lines up with the destination. Then turn the boat about by push the rudder until the boat comes about. This is called tacking. You will briefly be aiming into the wind while doing this. If you do this too slowly, you will lose momentum and in a real boat you would be even unable to rudder at all. But our ancestral magical oar helps us here. Suffice to say, try to do a "tack" quickly.

Sometimes you may need to tack many times because of obstacles, but remember that each time you tack, you loose speed, so try keep the number of tacking moves down. It's quite easy and good practise to try tacking back upwind in the chapter-end ocean scene between the 2 rows of columns, just to get used to doing this move smartly.

Jibing, is just tacking, but in a downhill or downwind direction and is significantly simpler.

Avoid sailing into rocks, and sailing over reefs which will damage your boat if the swell drops you into the reef.
Rocks and coral reefs are not the only water based hazards. You may at some point opt to fit your boat out with spikes, when you start encountering sharks. I found that avoiding them altogether was more prudent however. A moan I do have is the middle-mouse targeting button. when you get attacked by flying hermit crabs called Crobsters. (They make a kind of whoopee exclamation noise as they jump aboard) you have to drop your tiller and target them and kill them. But you cannot sail again until you untarget the removed Crobster who is long gone.

Pretty to look at, but very nasty if touched.

Combat is not that tricky if you use middle-mouse button to activate the target lock mode.
You do need to undo a target lock once an animal dies, which is a bit of a surprise the first time when you find locking onto the next foe does not actually work until you click that middle button again.

Suffice to say, bringing a "bigger gun" is advisable, it's possible to one-shot some smaller beasts with bone arrows. Bows are a good way of not getting hurt in this game, because some creatures are super hard to kill using melee weapons. Once you get into melee, you will need to learn how to use the roll-dive and block moves or else the stun time some of the baddies dish out will have you on the back foot

Gain health by visiting shrines like this one

Once you can craft a stack of bone arrows, you want to kill a gorehorn beast for its horn. Which you need to craft a spade, to dig clay out with. This clay allows you to craft bombs and potions.

You can use your bow as a telescope, neat trick, just do not fully draw or else you lose that arrow. Better bows have a greater zoom factor.

I'm still getting started on this chapter and the monsters are getting tougher. Will update the guide once I have more tips, because up to this point it's been pretty easy going. Stick around and comment if you have any tips at all.

dafont.com for font "Painted" by Heather T
paint.net tool

If you liked this game you might want to check out more of the chilling titles in a curated list in the Empathy Games Group