If you have a small BF island near by look to use that. Easy to clear, lots of tin.

You want to work in the BF without too much molestation from the critters that live there?
1. Don't go at night. There are extra spawns of all mobs in every biome at night time.
2. First scout out the area and locate the Greydwarf nests which spawn them. Destroy them and any Greydwarves you come across.
3. It also pays to scout first because you can also locate the Skellie burrows/ruins and Troll caves. Don't work within earshot of those.
4. Go to work ;)

Have you tried clearing out the camps in the area first? I haven't tried to verify this, but in my experience these groups don't respawn, just the smaller ones with three Greydwarfs which should be manageable.
And it's possible to drop stuff you don't need from your inventory.

Early on when I first go mining in the Black Forest I usually setup a little mini camp around the mining site. Just a tiny half-assed shelter, but lots of torches. Then I work night and day until done load up the cart and go home with my goodies.

The torches split up the brutes and shamans from the little ones since the little ones run away from torches. Helps break up the pack a little to pick them off one by one. Then I keep the resources. It takes a little longer but you get free wood, rock and resin for more torches.

Appreciate the tips. To note, I scouted the entire forest before doing anything there; And killed every single spawner before doing anything. And I'm nowhere near any troll caves or burial chambers. It -was- night time though so I'll give that a shot.

Originally posted by Nefrarya:

And it's possible to drop stuff you don't need from your inventory.

While it's possible, the reality is that this early in the game, I need all this stuff. I can toss the extra eyes and stone, but, all the wood? Yeah. I use a lot of wood. And if I'm being forward thinking, I definitely want the stone too. And resin = base lighting; but is also fairly light. It's mostly the stone and wood that take weight up fast, and I want them both in tremendous amounts for building.

Originally posted by Metradon:

Early on when I first go mining in the Black Forest I usually setup a little mini camp around the mining site. Just a tiny half-assed shelter, but lots of torches. Then I work night and day until done load up the cart and go home with my goodies.

The torches split up the brutes and shamans from the little ones since the little ones run away from torches. Helps break up the pack a little to pick them off one by one. Then I keep the resources. It takes a little longer but you get free wood, rock and resin for more torches.

Hadn't occured to me to place torches to weed out the babies; Will give that a try. Still annoying to get assailed by a brute and shaman every tree or other tree though. They aren't a threat to me- Effectively beat the game previously and played (way) too much darksouls so my parry skills are pretty good. Just pure annoyance at this point as the constant attacks basically mean 'chop chop, parry, stab, stab' instead of the more time efficient 'chop chop chop chop chop' :P

Sometimes I just put a bed down in a forward mining base, and then just sleep at night to bypass the whole night thing.