There is a very well done in game journal, that is essentially the wiki. It includes crafting recipes, as well as more free form, expository writing on general gameplay and progression. Most mods also do a good job of including their own journal pages and info as well. Though there’s some things that take struggling on before the info provided fully clicks. There is a prospecting system for example to help you locate ores since they are rarer with bigger deposits. I struggled with it for a while, but eventually you develop this sort of intrinsic sense of how to use the info the tools provide. There’s a very satisfying progression in most of the game systems from floundering at first, then understanding the numbers behind it, then internalizing the optimization and it becoming instinct. Very much matching the layperson to apprentice to specialist progression. I’ll finally add that the game does have sort of RPG style classes that encourage people to play multiplayers and specialize into a particular job. There’s is a commoner class that doesn’t have any drawbacks, but also doesn’t have the bonuses the other classes get which is okay for single player, but to give a small spoiler,
Tap for spoiler
I’d suggest using the tailor class for your first solo play through. Winters are brutal and being able to repair clothes rather than always have to craft new ones is huge. Also flax, plant lots of flax as soon as possible.
Don’t be afraid to abandon a save after a few in game days and take what you learned into a new one. Or check out the difficulty settings/sliders, there’s lots of ways to tune your experience. If you don’t get your feet under you it can be grueling to try to recover.
Depending on the game and comfort with bash scripting you can roll your own mod managers. I don’t really play Minecraft anymore, but if I did it would be heavily modded. In an effort to avoid installing a client/launcher beyond the one I already use I just keep folders for mod lists and configs, and then have bash scripts with aliases to do all the necessary file moving to swap between mod packs.
This doesn’t really work for most other games, but for things that run natively on Linux can usually do the trick.
For things running through proton it’s a bit more involved, but I also found a lot of satisfaction in figuring out how to manually install mods within the proton prefix. Used to have to do that a lot to mod Skyrim when it first came out and I got it running through wine on a school issued MacBook.