All right I typed a long ramble in here 
I deleted that. LOL I’ll try and make a more helpful response. Boundless is actually pretty well-balanced. The title is about leveling but the talk quickly turns to coin and the thing is that @SWProzee1 is 100% correct about coins. And all the other comments as well.
To your example of an isolated player, learning/starting to get around, experience is more of a concern than coins, even though coins seem very sparse in the starting game. It’s counter-productive to push forwards with gear too quickly, in that it’s wasteful in terms of return on your investment.
Here’s a quote from the thread on that character I mentioned before. A bit of analysis - there’s more in the thread but I left that character quickly because it was clear that he could afford gear well before he could make proper use of it:
In the end, I guess my point is that it’s important, in terms of leveling, what you want to do. Because there isn’t “the way”. You can level nearly as fast placing the right blocks as you can XP farming blocks or hunting in a big gang.
The best coins come from low XP activities, tedious grind, and selling XP. Or pick your favorite combo of the 3 
So here’s some “generic” advice, I guess. For someone who wants to level up specifically.
- Don’t worry about coins. Coins will come.
- Break stuff.
- Save everything. Discard Nothing. At the very least, everything is coin.
- Learn what you can do with things and do that, too. Compact it. Extract it. Smelt it. Refine it.
You will have levels quickly. And plenty of coin to advance. You still have to learn the markets etc… and that’s going to take a minute anyways. Only if you refuse to do anything but build in survival would I personally recommend pursuing building techniques for leveling because they work best with expensive materials.
It’s super hard to make a generic guide 