I gave adventure mode another try. No longer being accosted by bogeymen each night is nice since I have yet to figure out how to find or build shelters. My quest: to find yellow sand. It took a few days, and I was ambushed by a pack of 3 giant dingoes. The learning curve is real. I'm not sure, but I think I was crawling everywhere for the first day. And it took a few passes through the wiki to figure out how to re-gain possession of my spear that kept getting stuck in the dingoes. The first 2 began to flee after a few stabs, but the 3rd wouldn't leave me alone, and took many heavy strikes to the neck and head to finally drop. It seemed like stabs to the body, despite piercing organs, did little to slow down its bite attacks. In hindsight, a battle axe would have probably been more effective.
I continued to run around and attack the more dangerous things I could find, which so far was a pack of dingo people, about 8 or so of them. Somehow, I managed to end up wielding my own copper low boot instead of my spear. I'm not sure how to equip weapons other than dropping it out of the backpack, and picking it back up again, but that works.
Some evil mountains looked inviting, but only had wormy tendrils and regular eagles. Fast travelling around them to try and find more worthy opponents, the game froze right when I discovered a cave...