Ok, a VERY brief glance at a couple newbie guides to 7dtd assures us that what we want to be building first is a sleeping bag, so we can respawn in one place. That seems like a great idea. Now, I just need a bunch of cotton. Good news is, you can just grab up cotton plants from where-ever they are growing - no harvesting or chopping or anything. Bad news, cotton is pretty scarce in some of the locations.
After finding enough cotton and slowly assembling cloth fragments and then sleeping bags (and then subsequently losing all that hard work by picking up the sleeping bag and dying with it in my inventory while trying to move it to a new location), the new challenge is building a real shelter. Because just crouching down at night and hoping to not attract the attention of running, glow-eyed zombies seems like a pretty bad apocalypse plan.
We finally figure out that the stone axes are sufficient for chopping down medium-sized trees to get those wood planks the game keeps hinting at, it just takes some significant chopping to get one down. I assembled a rudimentary... square of wood frames, but they're see-through, and zombies still rush at me at night, and several things become apparent: 1) there's no hiding from zombies? 2) wood frames are super breakable by zombies, and 3) when there's nothing supporting a wood frame, the whole lot of it falls and breaks apart! Sucks. Time to do some more reading up and maybe restart the server.
