I will sometimes play what I call a "Sprint." The idea is I want a quick game that I can play in a night or over a weekend.
I make a world, start the game, use godmode to teleport myself to a corner of the map, then turn off godmode. My goal is to get to the opposite corner of the map in some amount of time, often 2-3 game days. I want the time to be enough that I need to worry about food/water and face a tough choice about what to do during the night -- do I hunker down and hide, or do I try to make progress.
There can be other interesting choices. For instance, do I spend time looking for a cooking pot? Hunting while traveling is easy enough, but being able to cook the food and boil water is handy. Where do I find water? If its the Vanilla game, how much time do I spend searching POIs for water? Do I want to spend time looking for better tools?
What skills would you take that are different than normal? Is Iron Gut more useful now? Maybe reduced stamina loss from running would be handy.
If you want a longer spring, spawn in, try to reach all four corners of the map, and then get back to the starting point -- kind of like if somebody inserted you via helicopter, you're scouting, and then need to get back the LZ for a pickup. Give yourself BDUs and maybe a gun with a couple of clips of ammo, maybe some rations.