Is there any other ways to get wood, stone or clay etc than by exploring? There never any for sale in the player item trades apart from for 27585874 (or some weird number-just why lol?) and I'm struggling with explore. I get maybe plus 5 to 10 of each resource a day if I'm lucky, its gonna take me months to even build one thing at this rate :( 

Blueprints I've found fairly easily so that's not an issue, just the actual resources -feel like I've missed something obvious maybe?

The weird number is to get around the item cap. For example, after 999 wood you can't collect any more from explore but if you put some up on trades the game doesn't recognize the amount on trades so you can collect some more. To prevent people from buying out your stuff you put the highest price possible and that weird number is the highest amount the game recognizes. After you put a certain amount of digits, it'll appear like that. 

With explore, that's where leveling pets comes in handy, higher levels have bigger maps = a ton more materials. Get 10 good pets, do your daily 20 explores with them and focus purely on leveling the rest.

And once you build the astrologist that's super helpful. Plus as a beginner, if you do all your 20 explores you should have a pretty good amount of food ;) An extremely valuable resource. Put up some exchanges using it.

Oh thank you explaining the number thing, that makes so much sense now! A clever trick, ill keep that in mind for when I'm a pro at all this! 

Ah that's what I'm missing, until I found a few good pets I only had level 1-2 which would be making things harder! Once ive got enough pets, how do I level them without exploring? Is that where the arena comes in? I wasn't quite sure when to be using it!

Ill look into the astrologist too, from a quick search it sounds very useful.Thanks for all the tips :)

Np, glad I could offer some insight ^^

And yeah, the arena is your best friend for leveling. Non GP throdamas and deviants are usually not too great in genes so those are the easy exp prey. I highly recommend manually fighting the pets you want to actively level instead of just throwing them in the arena. That way you get to choose your opponent and your pets don't get pit against really well-bred pets. Your pet doesn't get exp if they lose.

I know some people who level through crafting but that's usually reserved for really bad pets that can't win fights. And training your pet through the riding hall is probably not affordable when you first start playing.