There is currently a guide for new players on the wiki, and another on the forums - there's also a section on the forum for beginner questions.
I plan to add a short in-game tutorial at some point.
AP are action points, and represent your character's limited time and energy. Most actions in Shintolin cost AP; when your AP drops below 0, you must rest before you can do anything else.
Action points are automatically restored every hour. If you rest inside a building or by a campfire, you'll recover AP more quickly.
You lose 1 hunger point every 8 hours - eating one food item restores 1 hunger point. If your hunger hits 0, you will slowly lose hp. Your character will automatically eat if they have food in their posession, so keep stocked up and you'll be OK.
If you've just signed up, you should probably try to find a source of food, though your supply of noobcakes will keep you fed for the first few days if you want to explore. Gaining XP so you can buy skills and level up is a good idea. Much of the action in Shintolin takes place in settlements, so joining one might give you both assistance and things to do.
Shintolin is open-ended, and players can decide their own goals. Once you've found your feet, you could try to earn a living by hunting, farming, crafting or trading, get involved with settlement life and politics, gather some followers to found your own village, embark on a war of conquest, or try something else entirely. It's up to you.
Searching isn't succesful every time, so you might need to try searching a few times before you find anything. If you're still not finding much, keep the following in mind:
When your HP drops to 0, whether by injury, starvation or something else, you become dazed. Your actions are limited and you recover AP more slowly; another player must revive you with a herbal poultice or herbal tea (you can't revive yourself).
Your best bet for revival is to find a settlement with a hospital; failing that, finding a large group of people will give you a better chance of being healed than staying in the countryside. Try offering items for someone to revive you, and be sure to actually ask other players for revival.
That depends on them; maybe they didn't like you taking items from their stockpile, maybe they didn't like you chopping down their trees, maybe they just don't like strangers. Try another village, you might find a better welcome.
To explore the different options in the world of Shintolin, you are currently allowed to register up to 3 accounts, however there are certain rules. You must keep your characters seperate (at least 10 tiles apart). They must live seperate lives, and not assist each other in any way. Registering multiple characters to acheive your goals is known as zerging or alt abuse, and is against the spirit of the game. Shintolin is about collaborating with other people, not a 'who-can-register-the-most-throwaway-accounts' contest.
Actions considered alt abuse include having characters that reside in the same settlement, characters trading items with each other, characters ganging up to attack another character or animal, and one character leaving items in a stockpile for another to pick up. This isn't an exhaustive list.
There is currently a 330-hit IP limit to prevent you registering more than 3 accounts. I plan to add more advanced features to prevent alt abuse, though thankfully it isn't much of an issue at the moment.
No.
Shintolin was originally written in PHP, with a MySQL database. For version 2, the game engine was rewritten in Ruby.
Shintolin owes many of its game mechanics to Urban Dead, which features grid-based gameplay and an AP system, and is set in a quarantined city during a zombie apocalypse. There are several browser games based on Urban Dead; of all of them, Shintolin probably shares the most similarities with Shartak, which is about life on a mysterious tropical island.
Some of the features of settlements are based on strategy games, such as Civilisation and Stronghold.
Post them on the suggestions section of the forums - I try to look at all well-thought-out ideas. Also, be sure to comment on other people's suggestions; it's a big help when designing to have different points of view to read.