Ah yes. The getting your ass kicked part of kenshi. Be careful of Wild life. Animals are scary in this game because some of them just eat you once you're down.
If things are still rough try buying a house in a town. You can click on buildings and the ones for sale have a price tag in the lower left.
From there build a research bench and just research everything you can. This will require books, ancient science books, and eventually engineer designs and ai cores.
These items can be purchased from tech hunter shops/general stores or found in the wild forgotten places of the world.
For just barely getting your crew going it is helpful to have a few people taunt and block to focus enemy attacks and then take the rest of your people and focus down one enemy at a time. I still use this technique when shit gets hairy.
Also, wooden sandals + being weightless for encumbrance + having 40 or so athletics will let you outrun most threats. Managing a squad to make sure they're are no slow pokes takes a little effort but ensures that you can flee when needed.
I started my own base last night as well. Remembered some things.
Prospecting the location is important. Looking for decent resources is key. Green environment let's you grow most things, arid is limited to cactus I think.
Water is important for farming, stone for building structures, iron for building industry and copper for building tech.
Copper is rare and not 100% necessary in large quantities for a base if you aren't going heavy into tech. But it's definitely awesome to have on hand.
If you are going the house route you can build a mining operation just outside town to process what you mine. It will count as a base, don't bother trying to protect it or build any walls Just run when raids show up.
Once you find a spot. Press shift+f12. This brings up a command consol. There are cheats and other things in here but a lot of the time you can break your save if you're not careful. What you are looking for is the navmesh.
You want to rebuild the local sector. This will clean up a lot of weird pathing issues and spots that seem like they should be accessible but aren't.
Also if you designate a structure to be built in an area your people can't get to and you now want to remove that building frame/ blueprint but can't get anyone close enough to dismantle it. Shift+f12 select the structure and press delete.
Lots of other little things but one last thing. When you build processors and other machines like benches. Make sure they are well lit near the access points with torches or lamps. Working in the dark reduces efficiency. Hiver lanterns are great as they are light sources that follow your worker around.