Been playing for a bit now. As a tip, farm materials in the "Perimeter area" or "Outer Area". It's the best spot to farm loot from what I can tell, (mainly because it only takes 20min to explore unlike other locations)
You can farm like 80 soul shards pretty easily from the Bone Corpses (from the corpses degrading from time), you can get food easily from cooking the mice (attracted by the corpses), and you can easily get dozens of advanced metal essences and metal essences from the train wrecks (taken apart via metal essence axe, which is: (pure metal essence + stick = enhanced axe, use workshop -> enhanced axe + 2 charcoal + pure metal essence))
So it's very easy to get all the glass, metal, sticks, and soul essence.
After that you can easily deal with all enemies and stuff, the only things you need left are soulvines and other plants from park that's pretty easy to farm with the massive supplies you can farm.