Thanks for the tips everyone.
Literally an hour in, after picking up a quest, I got attacked by a Kraken, I shot its arms while attempting to steer out of the circle of tentacles before it eventually slapped my ship and picked me up, it finally let go and I got back to my ship, kept trying to repair but seems like the Kraken just pulls it under so I couldn't fight back, got stuck in the ship and couldn't get out before the screen went black and respawned. Ran out of time trying to find 2 damn white chickens for the quest so I just abandoned it.
Loving it so far, but I had some experience from watching people I know stream it so thankfully I wasn't completely lost. Selected another cargo run quest, but I picked up a message in a bottle and mistook that as the quest, so I grabbed a fruit box from the merchant guild thinking that was for the cargo run quest, filled it up on another island, finished that and realized I was looking at the wrong map, oops. I checked the correct map, saw I actually had like 8+ in-game days to complete it, I was wondering where I'm supposed to get this cargo from before realizing the name on the paper is someone in the outpost and not from the guild you grabbed the mission from. Grabbed the cargo from the barkeep and successfully delivered it to a small little fishing outpost without too much damage, decided while I was there I would fish for a bit, saw a storm nearby but assumed they didn't move and started fishing instead.
I then discovered storms do move, sat through the entire ~10 minutes of it making sure my ship doesn't fill up with water before going back to the main outpost and logging off. It was pretty scary seeing my compasses going all over the place, I can't imagine trying to steer through a storm with the wheel going all over the place either. For a game that's better suited for multiplayer, I had a ton of fun on my own.
Edit: Missed a word