Never tips
You should never:
Forget what your enemies can see
Clickers are blind, but they use echolocation (like bats use) to detect movement. Runners are less dangerous, but they can see you and alert other Infected to your presence. If you do a stealth kill on an enemy, it won’t help you if the next enemy can see you do it. You have to have full situational awareness of a scene. If you come out into the open in some way, you’re probably exposing yourself, and you should be aware of how big a risk that is.
Lose sight of your priority
Never pick up items that can’t help you in a firefight when other deadly enemies are still alive. The foes (human or Infected) are fast enough to close in on you while you’re collecting stuff. The exception is when you find something that you can quickly craft in hiding that will let you defeat the enemy. One time I happened to be in this exceptional situation where I was able to find things to craft more Trap Mines, which explode on contact.
Open fire too early
Staying in stealth is the most important thing you can do to stay alive in The Last of Us Part II. Go weapons-hot only if you have no other choice. In almost every situation, you face more enemies than you can handle, and some of them only come out when you (or they) blow your cover. This means you should crawl in the grass or sneak up on enemies and take them out, and wait until you know where every enemy is before you take out one in front of you.
When you are in stealth, assess the situation in the entire firefight space, if you can. It pays off if you know that the first story of a building is better than the second story.
Let your health drop
If you are shot in the shoulder with an arrow, you may bleed out. So you have to pull it out and patch up if you want to survive. You need to keep your health as high as possible and level up so that health kits go farther when healing you. If you use all of your available health kits, you’ll be able to scavenge more resources to make more. Sometimes you can find health kits in the wild that will patch your health immediately. So you can wait a bit before using the health kits you already carry.
Forget to craft items and abilities
The Last of Us Part II has you craft mechanical upgrades to your weapons, so long as you find lots of nuts and bolts. You can build useful additions like scopes for your bow and sniper rifle. You can add ammo capacity to your guns.
You also find bandages throughout the world and you can use this to upgrade abilities. For instance, you can get the ability to crawl faster through grass, which helps you escape from hunters. You absolutely have to craft the ability for health kits to heal more. You can use them to craft explosive arrows or explosive shotgun shells. You can unlock the ability to craft your own ammo for your hunting pistol, which can be as powerful as a shotgun, with one-shot kills.