Heheh, you don't have to walk for miles to find trees if you live in a forest.
When I first started out (over a year ago), I was living near NT, and I had awful trouble finding trees too. I ended up swimming across the lake more often than not. This time I've decided to go (ever so slightly) further afield. Unfortunately, in doing so I got horribly lost, as I said. I ended up travelling in completely the opposite direction to where I thought I was going, so when I tried to head back to civilisation, I ended up getting even more lost. I made it almost all the way to BBM before I encountered that troll, and that put an end to my crazy lost exploring.
I think this game is like DF, in that you have to set yourself some crazy megaproject. I'm going to tunnel right the way through the mountain. At least I tell myself that I'm going to, except somehow I get the feeling that I'm inevitably going to end up spawning all sorts of scorpions and cave bugs on top of myself, and get horribly eaten.
If we do end up getting enough people together to start a village, that valley north of the Bay of Swedes looks like a neat spot. It's got a teeny tiny lake, and it's pretty near to a clay pit. Alternatively, there's that desert northeast of Awesome Bay. It also has lots of clay. Of course, no DF project would ever be complete without magma! The other desert northwest of Awesome Bay has a nice lava pool nearby, so we can all get horribly killed by lava spiders. Losing is fun, right? This is all just going off a map, so I have no idea how good these sites actually are.