- Keep up with the crafting system, especially for weapons and accessories. Cooking is also good, chemistry is less necessary.
- Be a crazy hoarder. You can use junk materials to grind crafting skills. (You can even grind weapon/accessory crafting using grasses).
- Bring party members with you (either people or monsters) whenever you can.
- If you get your ass kicked even though you had party members, it's probably because your weapons/armor are out of date. Make better stuff and try again.
- Try to sell at least one of each crafting material; you can then buy them from Raven, which is a lot quicker than setting out to beat stuff up because you need another fang.