Tips and Tricks

General

• Depending on how many families you begin with (based on difficulty level) you will need between 4 and 6 houses before your first winter. In addition, you'll have to have a gatherer and forester, a woodcutter, a blacksmith and storage for stone and wood as well as a storage barn. These basics will ensure your survival.
• Generally speaking, its best to keep your houses close to where your citizens are working to keep their walking distance to a minimum.
• Currently Gatherers are the best means of producing food, generating up to 3,000 food per season. They also help to keep people happy and healthy by producing 4 types of food. Eventually though you will want to be fishing and hunting as well.
• Until you can afford cows and sheep, Hunters will be the only source of leather, along with the meat they produce. Leather is needed for making clothing.
• Both gatherers and herbalists need a forest to work and deer also like to be in a forest and there seems to be no "ancient forest" restriction on herbalists, a forester makes for a great combo with gatherer, herbalist and hunter. Place a few houses and storage nearby. There are only 2 downsides to this: every building needs some land, so decreases the effectiveness of this setup and it is best to keep houses in range of a market.
• Plants and herbs grow only under mature trees, and there is no such thing as an "ancient forest". This results in a situation where it is actually more efficient to place herbalists and gatherers near forester's lodges than in young forests, which are less dense. Another method is to build a lodge and disable cutting, then to build up to maximum tree density. Once that's done, replace the forester with the other buildings, conserving space.
• Firewood is a remarkably valuable trade good, considering the ratio between what is needed locally and is produced by your town. Selling your tools or leather clothes may be tempting, but these items are essential and firewood is plentiful. Some things like alcohol and food have zero value when selling them.
• Once you've increased your population, keep a few labourers available in your town. They will replace specialized workers that are lost. Any farmers or builders that aren't working will do the same as labourers: gather resources.
• Farming is incredibly inefficient when compared to gathering. One farm plot or hunter or fisherman needs around 4 workers and produces up to 1k food per season. Therefore, gatherers are the recommended source of food early on.
• Don't build foresters in places where their range intersects with an orchard, they will chop it down.
• When possible, don't build a building unless you have all the materials already in stock needed for its construction. When materials are trickling in, your workers might make lots of wasteful trips to the building site carrying only 1 or 2 units of materials. If you have everything you need in the stockpile, workers will bring as much as they can carry to the job site, thus ensuring the building is finished in as few trips as possible.
• If you avoid exporting your iron tools, you can put off building an iron mine for a very long time and just live off surface iron to keep your tool supply healthy. However, surface stone is unlikely to last long enough to cover your stone needs, so your first mining type building should be a quarry.
• A single woodcutter seems to be able to go through a single fully-staffed forester's log production by himself. If you need a supply of logs for building, you'll either need to pause your woodcutter, clear cut forests or get a 2nd forester's hut.
• For every additional square's distance from the stockpile, a steel-using wood cutter produces 3 fewer firewood per season