The game basically forces you to pick adventring and choose the knife and waterskin which is pretty lame game design.
If the dev reads this, my suggestions: 1. Add back the makeshift stone knife from Soulash 1 so you can get meat early on and 2. make the waterskin an early recipee like Adventuring LV 3 so you can get one fairly early. You could then maybe add a more weight efficient water storage in bottles that require higher adventuring so it's still worth leveling.