Hey I'm a new player never played a table top rpg and have a few questions about somethings.
1 When the players eat does it give hit points back and if so how do you know how much they gain based on what they eat?
2 How do you keep up with the time that passes in your world?
3. What are good ideas for envioroment decor to bring more life to the maps instead of buying the box?
1) See above
2) Time keeping can vary significantly based on the requirements of the adventure and the style of the DM. Some adventures have pre-written events that occur after a certain amount of days or weeks go buy,( a normal calendar will suffice here). In combat encounters, times are quite rigid and inflexible as certain spells have duration that depend on your level. But outside of combat I've seen DMs give a 5 minute invisibility spell 5 actual minutes in real time, and a 11 round vanish spell 66 seconds of real time. Some GMs use this to maintain the aura of realism and severity. Some GMs just make up time as they want, and as long as their players are enjoying themselves and are immersed in the story, then it shouldn't really matter.
3) Again, this varies. I'm a half decent artist so I just like to fill out my combat maps with objects, terrain, and visual markings to include elevation changes and hazards. I even throw out and draw my own town and regional maps as I see fit sometimes. I've also heard of people using simple blocks and/or old legos to alter combat maps and create things like stairs, pits, and cliff sides.
Welcome to the world of tabletop gaming! I discovered it 2 years ago, and have found it to be a wonderful and healthy outlet for my hyper creative brain.
Some other suggestions for a better gaming experience.
1) Background music is excellent (fantasy or ethnic/historic music instrumentals are awesome and certain uptempo songs for combat.
2) Team Effort. Especially for new DMs, it can be a great idea to assign areas of rules expertise to each member of your group. This serves to create a team atmosphere, will relive a lot of the already incredible amount of responsibility of the GM, and will cut down on time looking up rules.
3) Voices and Acting. Though this is not everybody's cup of tea, throw the fear of embarrassment to the wind and dive into character. You're already geeking out, and flexing your acting prowess or doing a voice can only help you refine those skills.
Good luck and have fun!
1) Most foods/meals will not heal. There's a couple outliers but most tend to be magical in nature anyway. Spells like Goodberry and Heroes Feast spring to mind. But if you really dig into the item list I'm sure you might find something else and you can probably homebrew potions to work as foods.
2) Time is dependent on GM. Some will clock/track it, others won't. Some might have a decent idea of how events beyond the PC's area are advancing, others just handwave it. It really depends on just the GM along with some other factors. Like if a player is a Werewolf, tracking Moon phases is suddenly actually somewhat important.
3) Do you have any dungeon based board game? Some of those might come with like little cabinet pieces or other such models to show areas of interest and objectives. Putting a few of those down can help to liven up the battle map a bit. Even if you don't have say Decent or gods forbid, Heroquest, look through your boardgames and see what pieces you might be able to reuse. I've taken to using Monopoly houses/inn pieces to represent towns for use on traveling maps.