Ariella's Passage to Egypt

Fixxxer's You Tube Video is a great guide for the beginning part of the game!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGAiKD2YnI

You'll need to build a Wood Plane (1 Slate Blade + 4 Slate) from Self/Projects/Carpentry.../Wood Plane.
Hold on, we need to also Self/Skills/Knap a Slate Blade. So find a shore (run along any waterline) and run to find more Slate. Better yet, walk. It is hard to stop on a slate spot. Slate can appear where the Mud icon lights up.

• at the Very beginning of Passage to Egypt, they only have ONE icon. The (usually greyed-out) slate icon. Other icons don't appear until they are ready for that stage of learning

You need to click Build on the icon with all the arrows in the upper left.
Build up to 10 more.
Go get lots of slate, over 100, and Knap that into Slate Blades.
Make sure chats are minimized then hold down the P hotkey and swipe your cursor back and forth over all those wood planes to plane lots of boards quickly.
When a plane isn't working, hover your cursor over the plane and hit the R hotkey. It uses 1 Stone Blade.

Picking Wood from Trees. An explanation of Oasis is needed here.
An Oasis in this game can be 1 - 12 flora (trees, plants, thorns) in a group.
In the pic below there is an Oasis of 4 trees and several plants.
Each Oasis group has a chance of spawning an herb.
The pic below says the Bottle Tree will give you 4 Wood. But why do you get 16 Wood when you click Gather?
If you check out the Trees wiki page you will see that some trees produce 1 wood and a few 4 wood.
As of Tale 9, instead of Gathering from each tree separately, you gather from ALL the trees in the oasis group at once.
So whichever tree you click on, the amount of Wood for that tree x the number of trees in the Oasis group is what you receive.
To Gather Wood from all the trees within an Oasis group you can click on any of the trees within the group.
After picking wood from an oasis, a timer of 2 minutes, 58 seconds starts before you can pick wood from the Oasis again.

Want to pick Wood faster?
Click the gear icon on the far right top/One Click and Related/Check Fast gather wood from Trees
Click on a tree and it gathers all the wood without a tree menu popping up.

Plane 250 Boards to raise your Carpentry Skill to Level 1.