Honestly, once you get the basics down, it's really easy to survive if you make a fort in a place that's not close to anything dangerous. After that it's mostly about learning how to build various fancy contraptions like mist generators and traps and stuff. Then you can start trying to survive in more dangerous areas.

Also, how mouse heavy is it? I like to be able to do keyboard shortcuts whenever possible.

Mostly everything has a keyboard shortcut, in fact before the UI got overhauled for the steam release, there was only keyboard shortcuts, no mouse input was allowed.