Once you’ve made your selection, you will need to click on the small white bar at the bottom of the screen and enter the name you want the character to use.  The space is short, but you aren’t limited to only letters either, so you should be free to do as you like with your character’s name.

Once you’ve created your character, you will move on to the world selection screen.  Here, you will select to use an existing world, setting your character loose there, or create a new world.

Each new world has two attributes- a seed, which is the number that the game uses to generate its map.  If two players use the exact same seed, then their worlds should be virtually if not completely identical, thanks to the way procedural generation works- but since you’re allowed a rather large string of numbers the chances of your using the exact same set as another player is fairly low.  Finally, you name your world- and then you’re off into a new, semi-random landscape.

Be very careful when starting out- your initial location is random, so you may find yourself dropped essentially right into the middle of an unwinnable fight.  The very first thing you should do is look around, followed by picking a direction and running in it until you find a road.  Once you have found a road, you will need to follow it until you find a city.  This is the only way to ensure a non-frustrating survival: while you will revive at revival points when you die, there is no guarantee that a revival point will be convenient (some are located in treetops or underground), or even anywhere that you can find your prior location from.  You simply aren’t going to be able to maintain survivability without a city, as crafting stations are there as well as shops, providing you your only decent source of food and healing, as well as consumable items to keep you functioning in and out of combat.

Until you have located a city, it is a good idea to avoid combat with anything not obviously of no threat to you (such as a cat or a bee)- many things that seem like you ought to be able to handle them will quickly turn out to be more than you can cope with, leaving you dissolving into a cute little scattered mess of cubes on the ground.