One Hour One Life Forums

Though I know that other basic guides exist, I wanted to write my own because I do not think that one exists that has the same purpose and covers the same material as this one.  If you see any errors or think that there needs to be some additions, feel free to comment below.

This guide is primarily intended for brand new players of the game who are a bit overwhelmed by the long list of things to learn and for players who prefer to learn as much as possible by actually playing the game but don't want to make life difficult for the more experienced players while they're doing so.  As such, this guide focuses on only the basics of the game like tips for survival and working with the other players rather than on how to make everything.  There are a crafting spoilers in this guide, but only for extremely basic items that are absolutely critical to keeping yourself alive.  This guide also assumes that you'll have players who are more experienced than you around doing the more complicated things that you don't know how to do yet, and teaches you what you can do to help them help you.  The goal here is to help you get over that initial hump from not knowing anything to knowing enough to be a useful village member whose contribution outweighs whatever they take.  I explain a lot of things in great detail here, but hopefully this is something that you can read just once or twice and remember and not something that you need to reference all the time.

That being said, I'm guessing that most players who find this guide are not the newest of new players, because it does take some effort to actually find it in the forum.  Still, if it helps anyone fill in the gaps of their knowledge of the basics then it's still very useful indeed.  And if you know of anyone that you think would benefit from this, please point them this way.

Controls:

To move, simply left click wherever you would like to go.

If you left click on an object, you will walk over to it and try to interact with it - in most cases that means picking it up.  If you left click on something you can't really do anything with, like a large rock buried in the ground, you will walk over to it but fail to actually do anything.  If you left click on something you can't move but it does have something you can take, like a berry bush with berries, you'll pick up that item instead.  If you left click on an object while holding another object, you will attempt to make these two objects interact with each other - this can mean something like putting the berry into a basket, or it can mean something like crafting them into a new object.  If you are holding an object and left click on yourself, you will eat it if it's edible or wear it if it's clothing.

All other interactions are right click.  If you right click on an open space while holding an object, you will put it down.  If you right click on an object while holding another object you will trade what is in your hand with the object that is on the ground.  If you right click on a container, like a basket, you will pick up an object from the container instead of the container itself.  If you need a particular object in a container you can right click on it directly, but often times it will be hard to do so because it will be hidden behind other things - if that's the case, you can right click on the container repeatedly and it will cycle through the objects until you have the one you want.

To talk, press 'Enter', write your message, then press 'Enter' when you're finished.  If you start as a baby you can only say one letter at a time, but this expands as you grow - the elderly can type full sentences.

User Interface:

Your food meter is in the lower right corner of the screen.  It starts with only four boxes for a newborn baby, expands to twenty when you're an adult, and then shrinks again when you become elderly - your are back to having only 4 when you die of old age.

Above your food meter you will sometimes see an indicator telling you when you are full, and warning you when you're hungry.  When you have three boxes left, this will change to say that you're starving and you'll hear a warning sound effect.  Note: When you become extremely old, you no longer get the starving warning or sound effect, so you must pay careful attention to your food meter if you want to die of old age instead of starving to death when you're nearly there.

Your temperature meter is in the lower right corner of the screen.  The best temperature is the line in the middle - if you are there then your food meter drains very slowly.  If you are hotter or colder, your food meter drains faster the further from the middle you are.  Most of the world is cold, but clothing and buildings can help you keep warn.  Be careful about going into deserts and snowy areas - it's very easy to starve to death in these extreme temperatures.

Above the temperature meter is your crafting guide.  This shows you possible things you can make with the last object you touched.  Press 'Tab' to see more if there is more than one thing you can craft with the object.

At the center bottom of the screen you can see what your mouse is hovering over.  If you hover over a person, it will say how you are related to them and their name (if they have one).

Just above that, you will sometimes see a Home arrow.  This points you to your home marker, if you have one.  You inherit your mother's home marker, if she has one when you're born, or you can make your own.  If you do not have a home marker but hear a bell and it's 'nearby' (it may actually be a very long distance away, but it won't be so far that you can't make it there if you want to) then you will get a home marker pointing to the bell, which can only be made in an older village.  (Which could be a nice, well-developed place to live or an old, run-down place that has seen better days, so you take your risk if you follow a bell.)

How to Be a Baby:

As a baby, you can't do very much and are dependent on other players to care for you.  If they don't or fail in the attempt, you will die.  You can't interact with most objects, including food.  About the only thing you can do is move, but you can only walk very slowly.  In many cases you will be born to someone who can't or won't care for you - they may have a good reason, like there isn't enough food, or they could be a lazy player.  Either way, it's best to simply accept the situation and be reborn somewhere else.

If you are being cared for, the main thing you need to do is to let the other player know when you need to be fed.  They can't see your food meter, so if you don't tell them then they'll have to guess and they might guess wrong.  Usually you want to tell them when you have two boxes left on your food meter - the 'starving' warning happens at three, but especially when you're a young baby that doesn't give the other player much time to do anything else besides.  But you don't want to wait too long because the other player may be slow to respond, need to drop something, or fumble a bit when they try to pick you up - and sometimes all three.  In fact, if you suspect that the other player is in a situation where this is a real possibility, you may want to be a bit early...

One thing to be cautious about is that only women of childbearing years can breastfeed you, so if your caregiver becomes too old she can't do so anymore.  And some players don't notice immediately that this has happened, so they'll try to breastfeed you anyway and   This can even happen to your own mother, and it can happen even moments after you are born.  If this happens, try to run to the nearest woman who can feed you, and she'll usually do so.  If there isn't one, attempt to alert anyone nearby to your lack-of-food situation, and hope that they know how to hand-feed babies (not all players do, but anyone who is not a baby is capable of that).

When you're born, you can only say one letter at a time.  Because of this, most players understand these letters to mean these things:
F = 'Food!' or 'Feed me!'
H = 'Hello!'
I-L-Y = 'I love you!'
K or O-K = 'Okay'
N = 'No'
O or O-L-D = 'You're too old to feed me!'
Q = 'I read the forum, so you should keep me, because I'll be useful and helpful when I grow up'
R = 'Rawr!'
T or T-Y = 'Thank you'
Y = 'Yes'
Don't try to say much else until you can say at least two or three letters unless someone asks you to - many players have a hard time understanding anything spelled out one letter at a time and will get really annoyed if you make them try.

Otherwise, often the best thing to do is nothing.  Whoever is caring for you needs to be able to click on you and they can't if you're wandering around.  Also, they may run off and do something, intending to run back in time to feed you, so you need to stay put so that they can find you again.  Often they'll pick you up and carry you if they want you to be somewhere else.  If you are being carried, don't try to move - if you do then you will jump out of their arms, and it's better to be carried - adults can move much faster than you.  However, you do want to watch what they're trying to do - they want to carry something somewhere and not leave you behind, you'll need to follow.  Sometimes they will tell you to do so, but if you pay attention to what they're trying to accomplish, you can usually tell when to follow without them having to tell you.  The other player will stop along the way to feed you, but you may need to stop yourself if they guessed that you could go further than you can between feedings.  Remember to always stop in an open space, where you're easy to click.

Sometimes you'll spend your entire babyhood standing in a fire and not seeing much, but if you end up doing some traveling, then pay attention!  If you're new to the game you won't really know the most important things to look for, but if at the very least you can remember where food is then that will help you stay alive when you're caring for yourself.  Knowing what's around you can not only be useful, but can save your life someday.  In fact, if your mom is a supermom she will give you a tour of the village and tell you where you can find things further away.

If available, go where you can get the best temperature.  This means your food meter goes down much more slowly, and that makes life easier for both you and the person caring for you.  Standing right in the fire is usually a good spot - in fact, someone might build a fire specifically so that you can stand in it.  Some of the spots right at the edge of the desert are also perfect.  Another good option is somewhere with a floor - or, even better, a bearskin rug.  Go wherever the temperature is best.  Do be careful if someone gives you clothes - they do help you keep warm, but many of the spots that are perfect for you when you don't have clothes become too hot.  And because only you can see your temperature, only you know where the best spot for you is.  Sometimes players don't know or forget that wearing clothes changes things for you, so they may still try to put you in the fire - if so, simply insist on moving out of the fire and try to tell them 'Too hot' until they stop it.  The space next to but not actually in the fire is often a good spot for a clothed baby, but check your temperature and go wherever is best.

Another good reason to leave a fire or other warm place is if there more babies than just you there, and you need to be fed - it's difficult for someone to click on you in particular if you're all on top of each other.  In fact, if you find yourself in a busy village with a nanny caring for many babies, she may directly tell you to do so.  That way the fed babies can stay warm in the fire and she has an easier time clicking on the babies that need attention.

You are no longer a baby when you are able to feed yourself.  You can tell when you reach this age because you will grow hair, but if you're unsure then just try to pick something up - if you can, then you're grown.  You can still be breastfed for awhile longer, but often your caregiver is either caring for your younger sibling by then or has been anxiously waiting for you to be old enough to care for yourself so that they can go do something else, so they may run off on you the second you're old enough or get annoyed if you don't get to work.  So you'll want to start doing things for yourself at that point.

How to Be a Small Child:

The most important thing to remember is that you still have a very tiny food meter, so always bring a snack with you wherever you go.  That way you can eat it and locate more food before you starve.  If you can grab a basket of carrots, that's great!  But if you can't then at least wander around holding a berry.  If you didn't see much of your surroundings as a baby you'll want to look around and get your bearings - where are good sources of food?  Where is the farm?  Are there clothes for you?  If you didn't get clothes as a baby, you'll want to grab anything that you can find.

Also, you'll want to pay attention to what everyone else is saying and doing.  Sometimes you'll be told what to do, but you can usually get an idea of what everyone else is working on by watching them for a moment or seeing what they're saying to each other.  That will give you a good idea about what you can do to help.  If you do get told what to do, keep in mind that many people forget that small children can't go very long between meals - you may need to wait until you're older before you can actually do the task that they want - especially going long distances to find things.  Then again, if you were born into a village without much food, you may have no choice but to go out there and hope you picked a direction where there's food along the way.

Speaking of food, whether it's helping out on the farm or gathering other kinds of food, since you need to eat so frequently it's often a good first job for a child.  Leave the non-food related jobs to the adults who can go for much longer without eating.

How to Forage for Food:

Very frequently you'll be in a situation where you have no village, or the village has a food crisis and you can't get any there, or you'll be searching for something and need more food than what you brought with you.  In those situations, you need to be able to find food in the wild.

The most useful thing to keep in mind when you forage for food is which biome has which types of food.  Sometimes you can find a few stray objects outside their normal biome, but only around the edges.  Each biome has a different ground color, and I've listed here the food you can eat in a foraging situation:
Green/Grass - Best food: Berry bushes, burdock, and wild onions
Brown/Desert - Some food: Cactus fruit.  But also snakes!
Yellow/Prairie - Little food: Wild carrots
Blue and Brown/Swamp - No basic food!
Gray/Badlands - No basic food!  Also, wolves and bears!
White/Tundra - No food at all!  Also, very cold!
As you can see, the best place to forage is in green areas.  However, everyone knows that is the best place so the other two places often get overlooked so it can sometimes be easier to find food there.

While foraging in green areas, if you have a choice it's usually best to take berries from wild bushes first.  They regrow over time, so after awhile whatever you eat will grow back.  Some players think that berries don't grow back or grow back more slowly if you eat the last one, but this is a myth.  But it is nice to not eat all the berries if you don't have to - if someone is starving and desperately looking for food and remembers where that bush is, it could save their life if there's even one left.  It's also worth noting that wild berries, unlike all the other foods, disappear five minutes after being picked.  They usually don't last that long, but do keep in mind that you shouldn't try to stockpile them and you should try to eat the older ones first.  (Note: If you see a lot of bushes growing in rows near the town, these are most likely domestic berry bushes, not wild berry bushes, and they grow differently.  See the part of the guide about older villages.)

The onions (which look like a little stalk with tiny, white flower) and burdock (a weird-looking green bush) don't grow back, so when you eat them they're gone, so you may want to save them for when the berries are running out.  Then again, their only use is for food so there's no reason to not eat them when you need to.  The berries and onions can simply be picked, but you need a sharp stone to dig up a burdock.  To make a sharp stone, find a stone and hit it against one of the big hard rocks.  If you're wandering around with a sharp stone, it's nice to dig up every burdock you see, even if you don't need it - that way if a hungry person wanders by who doesn't have a sharp stone, they can eat it.

While foraging in the desert, you need to be very careful - it's hot there, so you need to keep an eye on your food meter.  In fact, you may want to leave your clothes behind if you're going to be running around in the desert for awhile - it helps.  But you also need to watch your step because it's usually crawling with rattlesnakes - they won't try to attack you, but they bite if you step on their space.  However, the cacti in the desert grow fruit, which appears as a yellow thing at the top of the cactus, it's it's really filling and a good food source.  It takes five minutes for a cactus to grow a flower and then five more for it to grow fruit, and you only have five minutes before the fruit disappears, so grab it when you see it and make a mental note to check the area again soon if you see flowers.

The yellow areas are generally not a good place to forage, but it's better than nothing if you need the food.  Here you can find wild carrots, which can be dug up like a burdock root, and just like burdock root they don't grow back.  But always pick the seed first.  Even if you just leave the seed on the ground, someone will be by wanting it so that they can plant carrots in the farm, and if you don't pick it first then it will disappear when you dig up the carrot.  It's worth noting that, though eating wild carrots is perfectly fine as long as you do this, it used to be that the wild carrots would regrow their seeds and many players do not know that this was changed.  So digging up wild carrots used to be a horrible thing to do because it ruined a source of carrot seeds and everyone was taught not to do it, and they may get mad if they see you do it.  Now the one seed is all you're going to get, so you might as well eat the carrot once it has been picked.

How to Be Useful in a New Village:

By 'new village' I mean one where there isn't a farm yet.  This is a tricky situation for a new player because much of what needs to be done is making the things that will get the farm started.  But you can still be useful if you don't know how to do any of that!  Everyone, even the expert players, are going to be hurting for food.  So one of the most helpful things you can do is to grab a basket, forage for food to fill it with, and bring it back to wherever the main spot for stuff seems to be.  That way the players who are working on something more complicated can eat the food you brought and keep working instead of having to stop to find food themselves.

Can't find a basket?  Making one or several is another way to be useful!  There should be at least one basket for every person, and possibly even more if the farm is nearly set up.  To make a basket, take your sharp stone into the swamp and look for tule reeds, or to the yellow area and look for wild wheat.  If you use the tule reeds, you combine two reed bundles together to make a basket but be careful in the swamp, though - especially if you're young.  There is no easy food in the swamp!  If you want to make a basket from wheat in the yellow area there is an additional step - after cutting the wheat you'll get a wheat sheaf, which you need to hit with a straight or curved branch (not a yew branch).  That will thresh the wheat, and then you will have straw to use - combine two to make a basket.  But do not cut all the wheat.  You'll want wheat seeds at some point, and you can get as many of those as you want from a stand of ripe wheat, but if you cut all of them then you can get no seeds.  So leave at least one - and perhaps a few more as backups.

If food and baskets don't seem to be a worry, another way to be useful is to make string and ropes, especially if your village is very new.  In green areas you can find milkweed plants.  They're a green bush that cycles rapidly between having just leaves, pink flowers, and yellow fruits. Only pick the milkweed while it is fruiting.  If you pick it at any other time during its cycle, it will never grow back!  If you pick it while it's fruiting, it will take an entire hour to grow back, so you'll never see it but it will help people who come later.  When you pick the milkweed you'll get a stalk.  Combine two stalks to get a string.  Combine two strings to get a rope.  If your village is just starting out, bring a rope home and someone who knows how to make tools will think you're amazing because that's the hard part for four basic tools that they need.  If your village seems to have basic tools, bring home string instead and that will help people trying to make water pouches and clothes.

If all of that seems to be in order, another way to be useful is to hunt rabbits.  This is something a new player is less likely to do because the second there is a spare rope a more experienced player is likely to turn it into a snare and the second they get one of those they're likely to run off to hunt themselves.  But if you get a snare yourself, all you need to do to hunt rabbits is to put that snare on a rabbit hole with a rabbit in it. But only hunt 'family' rabbits - you can tell which rabbits are family rabbits because there is a baby rabbit with the big one.  If you hunt a rabbit without a baby, the hole will be abandoned forever, so don't do that.  Take the rabbit home (or, better yet, bring a basket on your hunting trip so that you can bring back three) and either leave them there for someone else or ask for help with turning them into useful things - you can make water pouches and clothes with them!

How to Not Ruin the Farm:

The almighty farm is an important fixture of the village once it's established - when it's running great then everyone can breath a huge sigh of relief and not worry about food so much, but when it's mismanaged everyone could quite possibly starve to death.  So it's important to know what you are doing!  It seems simple at first - plant the seeds, water the seeds, wait, harvest carrots, hoe, start again.  But there's actually much more to it.

Step one is the soil.  You can find piles of fertile soil in green areas.  Use a basket on one of these piles and it will be filled with soil.  Take it over to the farm, put it down where you want a new row, and there you have it!  It's very important to always be bringing in new soil, especially if your village is not collecting more wild seeds - soil gets used up when you're growing seeds from carrots, so that needs to be replaced and the farm needs to expand to feed all the new mouths that keep being born.  So don't just worry about growing more carrots, worry about keeping the farm nice and big.

Step two is seeds.  You can collect them from the wild, but as noted in the foraging section that's a very limited supply.  The other way to get carrot seeds is to leave carrots in the ground when they're ready to harvest instead of picking them.  Rows being left to seed are called seed rows, and you should never start helping out in the farm until you know whether or not there is a seed row and if so which row that is.  Never pick the seed row - you will probably kill everyone.  If there are no seeds, there are no carrots.  This is true even if you are starving to death and the seed row is the only food available - it's quite possibly better for you to starve to death than to eat the seed row.  Of course, if you can plainly see that there are more than enough seeds currently on hand to reseed the farm you might possibly decide to not take the seed row seriously, but otherwise the seed row is sacred.  And if the only grown carrots is the seed row, food is low, and you don't see a lot of carrots getting close to being harvested then the farm is now in a crisis - the best thing that you can do is leave the village and go forage.  If you can find other food to eat until the carrots are ready, that's extremely useful.  It's even more useful if you not only forage for yourself but bring back alternative food, like you would if the farm didn't exist.

Step three is water.  Water can be carried in water pouches or in a bowl.  Pouches are better because you can carry three at once in a basket, but sometimes you only have bowls and they're better than nothing.  Your source of water is usually ponds.  Ponds hold 5 bloops of water, but you should never drain the pond completely.  If you do, the goose will leave forever and never come back, and a drained pond never gets more water.  You can fix a drained pond by adding a bloop of water, and then it will refill again, so if you accidentally take that fifth bloop you should immediately put it back.  (The goose will never come back, though...)  Another possible source of water is a well, but that is less common.  The proper use of a well is more complicated than what I want to cover here, so do not use wells until someone teaches you how to not drain them dry.  Wells refill over time like the duck ponds, but if you take that last bloop of water then the well becomes dry for 10 hours, and can't be fixed by adding the water back.  Most of the wells you see will probably be dry anyways because someone who didn't know what they were doing was using it.

Step four is waiting for four minutes for the carrots to grow.  I'm going to assume that you can handle that without further instruction, though I would suggest that perhaps you should make yourself useful and find something to do while you're waiting.  Go make some baskets or something.

Step five is harvesting.  Also very straightforward, but never pick the seed row - you will probably kill everyone.  When it's time to harvest, note that you have five minutes to get them all picked, and if you don't get them all picked you'll have a lot of seeds... and a lot less soil.  So if the farm doesn't look tended or there's a lot of carrots and not very many farmers, go help out.  If there is nobody to tell you which row is the seed row - congratulations you get to pick.  Since 7 seeds grow from one row, you need at minimum (because having a few seeds to spare is not a bad thing) one seed row for every six rows you harvest (the seventh seed is so you can bring in new soil and plant a new seed row).

Step six is hoeing.  If there is a hoe available, great!  If not, or it breaks, someone needs to make a new one.  You need a straight branch from a maple tree - trim off the branches with a sharp stone, put a rope on it, then put the sharp stone on it.  More experienced players can make a better one in the forge.

Repeat.

Things to Keep in Mind in an Older Village:

By an older village I mean one that is large enough and has been around long enough to start to have Nice Things - like clothing, steel tools, walls, carts, and other such things.  If you're lucky enough to live in one of these places, everything explained earlier in the guide is still useful - someone (hopefully not you) might still ruin the farm and then you need to run off and go forage.  Making baskets is still useful.  Someone still needs to tend the farm.  But you might notice that the other players aren't running around desperately trying to survive so much and are instead doing cool things with sheep and stuff.  When you're in a place like this, that is a very good time to learn some of the things not covered by this guide - players are more willing to teach you stuff if they're not worried that they're going to starve to death.

But there are a few things that you should not do in an older village, or someone might literally stab you (because older villages can make knives, and angry people with knives get rather stabby...).

- Know the difference between a domestic berry bush and a wild berry bush.  You can see which is which by hovering over it with your mouse and reading the text.  I've also noticed that the last berry to be picked on a domestic berry bush is the one at the top, while the last berry on a wild bush is on the upper right.  The difference is important because you can pick and eat all the berries on a wild berry bush without any concerns whatsoever, but a domestic berry bush behaves differently.  If you pick only some of the berries on a domestic berry bush, they don't grow back.  They only grow back if you pick all the berries and water the bush afterward.  In fact if you don't water the bush after you pick the last berry, it will die.  So never pick the last berry on a domestic berry bush unless you intend to immediately water it, do pick that last berry so that you can water it and start the berries growing again,  and always water yellow bushes because those are the ones that are dying because someone didn't water them.  Also, most domestic berry bushes are not planted so that you can eat the berries - they're planted because a full bowl of berries are required for certain things (compost and feeding sheep), and you need a full bush to get a full bowl.  So don't eat the first berry on a domestic berry bush - otherwise the bush is ruined for that purpose.  But if someone else already ruined the bush, you might as well eat the rest - as long as, of course, you water it after you eat the last one.

- Do not harvest all of the wheat in the village at the same time.  The seeds for more wheat are plucked from ripe wheat, so you need to leave at least one row of ripe wheat standing to grow more wheat.  If you cut them all at once, you can't get any seeds to use to grow more.

- Don't let the sheep out.  Loose sheep eat the carrot farm, and the only thing you can do to stop their rampage is to kill them, so that's a big deal.  There are multiple ways of making a sheep pen so that the sheep don't get out - some of them you can just walk into, while others have kind of elaborate airlock systems, so it's better to ask someone if there's any trick to it before you risk letting a sheep out.

- Leave the potter, baker, and blacksmith alone while they're working.  While these activities are interesting and you probably want to learn how to do them, they're very time sensitive - the kiln, oven, and especially the forge don't burn for very long, so the player trying to do these things has a lot to do in a very short time and you need to stay out of the way.  If you stand in the wrong spot, you can make it so that they can't click on the next thing they need, which can ruin what they're doing.  So if you want to observe, do it from a distance.  If you want to ask questions, offer help, etc. then do it when their kiln, oven, or forge is not burning.  Don't try to help without asking until you're an expert, and even then it's nice to ask first.  And ask before you take anything near them - they generally need every tool, bowl, basket, plate, etc. that is around them.  And if you're running through the village, do try not to run through their work area.

How to Raise a Baby:

On the surface, raising a baby seems simple - you just need to keep them alive for a few minutes, and feeding them is as easy as picking them up (if you're a woman of childbearing years, at least).  But when you factor in the fact that you can only carry one thing at once, and you have other stuff you need to do in those few minutes, that's when it gets hard.  Really hard, sometimes.

The most important thing to remember is that if you die, the baby is almost certainly dead too.  That means it doesn't make sense to risk your life more than a little for the baby.  If keeping yourself fed was already a concern, whether you're in a new village or an old village with food supply concerns, it's better to abandon the baby.  If you have no issues keeping yourself fed, you can probably handle another little mouth to feed.  Most players are used to being abandoned as newborns, understand the situation, and appreciate it if you make the decision quickly.  In fact, if you're going to abandon the baby, don't pick it up even once - babies are born only half fed, so they die faster if you don't, and the other player would probably rather die quickly so they can hopefully be reborn to a better situation faster.  And if you do decide to keep the baby, the other player may disagree and run off - that happens too.

But if neither of these things happens, you have a few minutes of baby care ahead of you.  And for the first part of that, your new baby has a tiny food meter and will starve to death very quickly.  They're also born hungry, so pick the baby up immediately.  The next thing to do is to take them to the baby spot, if there is one - that would be the place where there's an almost constant fire and maybe even a nanny so that you can simply drop off the kid.  If there isn't a nanny, guess who is the new nanny?  If there isn't such a spot and you know how to make a fire, do so - just remember that the baby probably doesn't have a big enough food meter for you to do all the steps to make a fire without interrupting yourself a couple of times to feed the baby between steps.  If you don't have a fire, can't make one and/or don't know how, take the baby instead to wherever your reliable food source is.  That would be the farm if there is one.  If there isn't... do you know where there is a cluster of berry bushes that are mostly untouched?  Hopefully you have somewhere like that.  Otherwise you'll have to run from bush to bush, and that's even harder.

Anyways, you can somewhat relax once you have the baby safely in a situation where you can keep both of you fed easily.  This is a good time to name your baby.  To do that, while holding the baby say 'You are ___'.  The game understands a couple of other phrases like 'Your name is ___' but the 'You are ___' one is probably the best to remember because it's shorter.  If you want to check to see if the naming was successful, hover your mouse over the baby and you should see the name.  The game has a whitelist of names, so if you choose something unusual and not name-like the game will instead pick the closest name on the list to whatever you said.  Always name your children - otherwise they're grow up as a no-name nothing, and your children deserve better - don't they?  In fact, some babies kill themselves in shame if you don't name them...

Every time you pick up the baby to breastfeed, you lose one box on your food meter, but the baby is fed to full.  And stay full as long as you hold them, so you can carry them around without worrying.  In fact, that would be the best way to keep your baby fed, if you didn't have to put them down so you can feed yourself.  When they're first born, you can't put the baby down for very long at all, but as they become an older baby you can leave them for longer without having to feed them - especially if they're warm.  It's useful for your mothering skills if you pay attention to the way your temperature and age affects you when you're a baby yourself - that can help you understand just how often you need to pick up your baby when you're the parent.  Waiting until your baby says 'F' is also very helpful.  In fact, the most common mistake is to pick up the baby too often - that drains your food meter by one each time, so try not to do it too frequently.  On the other hand, better to err on the side of caution - it's simply a waste of food if you feed too often, but if you don't feed often enough the baby dies.

If you become too old to feed your baby, or want to feed someone else's baby and are the wrong age or gender, you can also feed the baby by hand.  To do so, simply pick up a food item and then click on the baby.  That will shove it into their mouth, and they'll eat it.  This is way less efficient than breastfeeding the baby, so it's more of a last resort, but it does keep the baby alive.

Once the baby is old enough to feed themselves, they'll likely run off and start doing stuff.  Though if you've ever been a starving small child yourself, do remember that you can still breastfeed them for awhile after that and that it's difficult to feed yourself when you're a young child - be nice if they want food.

How to Be an Eve:

An Eve is when you spawn as a young woman instead of a baby.  This is a difficult challenge for a beginner player, but it can be done - especially if you manage to raise a few babies and some of them are more experienced players.

Usually when you spawn as an Eve - guess what, you're a mom already!  What you do with your first baby is a difficult decision - some players insist that you must let this one die because you have literally nothing and the baby will be a huge burden that will slow you down.  Others insist that if you manage to raise this first baby, you'll have a helper within just a few minutes and this will make it way easier than doing everything yourself.  I personally tend to side with the latter, but you should make your own decision.  Or maybe the baby will run off and make the decision for you.

Either way, the first thing you should do is name yourself, because you can.  Or your last name, at least - your first name is Eve.  Say 'I am __' and the game will record your last name and give it to your kids too.  But only if you have a last name when you name your kid, so always name yourself first.

When that's done, it's time to find a home, and that's probably your most important task.  What you are looking for most of all is a good place for a farm.  It will be a place with plenty of ponds around - 4 is probably the minimum I would try personally, and more is better.  You also need soil, which would be in a green area.  Speaking of the green area - it needs to have as many berry bushes, wild onions, and burdock as possible: until the farm is set up, this is the food for your family.  A lot of milkweed is very helpful too.  It also needs to be not terribly far from a yellow area with rabbits.  You may need to run around for awhile before you find a spot with all that, but if you can find such a place then it's probably worth a try - as you gain experience you'll probably form your own opinions about what makes a good farm spot.  When selecting the exact spot for your farm, remember that when farms get going they need a lot of water but only occasionally soil, so it's better to put it nearer the ponds than to the soil source, even though it's more work to set up the starting farm rows.

When you have located a good farm spot, it's time to start gathering supplies and making the place a home.  It may not be a good idea to make the first place you gather supplies be the exact place where you want the farm - you want the gather spot to be an open area nearer where the food is at, and the place where you want to farm may not have a lot of food immediately nearby.  Just make sure your kids know where you want the future farm to be so that you're all on the same page.

After that you can start to behave like you would in any other new village - though you should keep in mind that because you're mom you have a higher food meter than everyone so you can do some things much more easily than your kids - like wander deeply into the swamp where there is no food to make baskets.  So try to focus on those tasks to help your kids out.  At the same time, try to be a good mom and raise your kids in spite of the difficult situation - but don't overdo it.  The more kids you raise, the more hands you'll have to help out, but the faster all the food near your starting location will disappear.  Exactly how many depends on the nearby resources - if there's hardly any food around, you might want to limit yourself to just a few, but if you found wild berry bush heaven then feel free to raise more.