I carefully knapped these stars out of a rock I found using a stick I found.

If that's your only motivation, then you'd probably get sick of it and go home before long. This stuff looks like fun when it's edited down to minute-long chunks and you get to observe it from the comfort of a climate-controlled room, but an hour of stripping tree bark will leave you pretty frustrated unless you've got more to go on.

Someone will gank him and take all his stuff before he even gets past the bronze tier.

That would defeat the purpose, which is to make believe that the problems society and technology bring aren't colossally outweighed by their advantages.

It's not gay hippy roleplay anymore if you're actually doing something a rational person living in the modern world would consider useful.

I think a rational person living in the modern world would consider heat and shelter to be useful.