Never craft a torch. You can take them for the price of one stick from fires as long as there’s 10 minutes left on the fire. They’ll never be above 50% quality, but cloth and lantern oil are much rarer than sticks.

The flare gun is the best weapon in the game. If you hit a moose or bear with the flare gun they will always run away and often die. I think headshots with the flare gun are an automatic kill on anything too, although the damage from the flare is at least partly damage over time, so you may need to wait a bit. Its pretty risky, but if you can down a moose with the flare gun early it will set you up with tons of meat and the hide makes an excellent pack.

Make sure you wear your most wind and water resistant clothes on the outer layers because these stats aren’t used at all if there’s another layer of clothing over it.

When you cook meat it always gains 50% quality. You can leave raw meat outside for a long time before it will degrade to 0%, but even then you can cook it and bring it up to edible again. For this reason it makes sense to stockpile meat raw, and only cook as much as you’ll need until you make another fire to cook or boil water.

Cold is the fastest killer in the game (other than predators). Try to avoid freezing as much as possible. Hot beverages help with this quite a bit if you can build a quick fire to warm up a cup of tea/coffee. Conversely, starvation will only slowly kill you, so when food is short one strategy is to let yourself starve throughout the day and only eat right before bed. If you feed yourself enough to get through the night (and aren’t dehydrated or freezing through the night) you’ll regain more health than you lost from starving during the day.