Right, I'm happy to share the stuff that confused me, or wasn't obvious when I first played the game, a.k.a. newbie's errors and tips.
1. Don't try making a custom class until you know exactly what each skill does and how they work in-game. Many skills sound cool but might disadvantage you early on, or slow down levelling up. On your first try, stick with a good default class, Warrior seems like a good all-around choice (at least in vanilla DF, DFU might be different). If you want magic, Healer or Spellsword seem like more or less good beginner choices.
BTW, perhaps DFU should come with a few saves with balanced pre-generated characters ready to play, like the
Betony demo did.
2. Never pick quick start when asked about character biography. Answer the questions and try to get useful skill boosts and items. Have a read of what each question does at the
USEP Wiki.
3. When distributing attribute points during character generation, look to up critical attributes to round numbers.
4. Don't be shy to run away from a fight if it feels too difficult, get to a safe spot and rest (e.g. get back to the starting cave of Privateer's Hold).
5. When talking to NPCs, experiment with conversational tones to train your speech skills. If one tone does not work, switch to another. Ask many people for directions and other info, don't pester one NPC with infinite questions. Also, ask people for news and you'll sometimes get a random hint.
6. Switch to Info mode and then press use when looking at a building, you'll get info about it and its opening hours (if closed), and will also mark that building on your map.
7. Never ever have more than one active quest, beside the main quest, on your list. All quests are timed and will take an indeterminate amount of time to finish, so do them one at a time. To avoid accidentally agreeing to random quests, try not to talk to innkeeps via the talk option (renting a room and ordering food/drinks is fine), and decline any quests if a random NPC suddenly offers you one if you already have a quest pending.
8. Buy or sell items one at a time to train your Mercantile skill.
9. Pay attention to shop quality in the description when you enter it, as poorer shops have lower selling prices but higher buying prices.
10. Don't waste time on doing non-member quests for any faction. Join at least one faction appropriate of your class (Fighters Guild for fighters, Mages Guild for mages) and a Temple, and do their quests. Early in the game, prioritise advancing your career in the temple as this is the only way to get potions.
11. Once you have access to potion merchant, make sure to stock on Cure Disease and Cure Poison potions, and carry a few with you and in the wagon when going to dungeons at all times.
12. Save often, and have several save slots for one character (which is the default in DFU). Usually I have three slots: town, dungeon and quest. Town is when you're in the town (or wilderness, but that should not be very often) without any pending random quests; dungeon is, obviously when you're in a dungeon). And quest is for saving immediately after accepting a quest, so that you could fall back to the start should something go awry during the quest.
13. Remember that as you encounter more monster types, some of them are immune to lower material weapons. Each time you level up, visit shops and look for weapons of higher level materials than you've got.
14. Don't burden your character with useless items, like multiple sets of leather or chain armour, or low material weapons that you might pick in dungeons. There are not worth their weight because of the low price. However, pieces of plate armour and good weapons will sell for a nice sum even if your character cannot use them.
15. Before accepting a quest or talking to quest-giver when a quest is completed, make sure your character is not encumbered and you can carry more items: if you receive a quest item or a quest reward, it might disappear if the character cannot carry any more stuff (might not be true for DFU but is a problem in vanilla DF).