Wilderness is safer than the city. It’s only too cold to plant in winter and early spring. By mid to late spring the ground will be warm enough to plant.
Swamps range from totally safe to super no-go - the amount of monsters that spawn there varies from tile to tile, so find a safe one if you can. It’s a source of food, from cattail stalks and occasionally giant flies and things, and fresh and salt water, and wood. In the dangerous ones you can often snipe a lot of meat from the corpses as everything runs around killing each other, you just have to be careful not to get too close to something that’s not busy fighting something else.
Forage in underbrush in swamp and forest tiles and you can find lots of food, but also canola seeds and thyme, which can be made into cooking oil, and then into thyme oil, which is a pretty effective first aid tool even if it’s slow to make. Bee balm can be turned into a cold remedy, and mugwort into an anti-parasitic if you caught something from drinking unboiled water.
Just be wary of flashing Zs on the overmap, out in the wilderness it’s probably a decayed pouncer or worse. Once you get within two overmap tiles the flashing Z will disappear as the creature(s) are now inside your reality bubble where they can come at you.
Some wildlife can be dissuaded from approaching you by yelling, but making noise may attract those flashing Zs so look before you shout.
