It's not actually about the difficulty; it's the learning curve. Progression depends heavily on gear, and even more heavily on player knowledge and preparedness.

Originally posted by u4all:

SUMMARY:
Armor - Shield - Food *also Mead when you are able - Weapon.

Get those in that order, as far ass your focus. Sneak often, until you do not have to do so.

If we're giving precise instructions, do them in this order, instead:

Plant-based food (mushrooms, berries), crude axe, flint knife (jumping sneak-attacks can one-shot unaware mobs - try attacking with your knife using middle-mouse-click, from cover, while sneaking), kill boars for leather scraps, crude bow, wooden arrows.

Use sneak attacks with the dagger until you get a bow, then use your bow at range and either axe or knife with a buckler for melee. Carry enough wood and stone to be able to build a quick workbench, a couple walls, a couple roof tiles, and a campfire any time you might need to stop for a rest. Adding enough wood for a few more walls, a door, and a bed is a pretty good idea, too.

Craft a flint axe (flint is found next to water in the Meadows), kill deer for leather hide (and a couple trophies), then make leather armor and a finewood bow (knock beeches into birches to get fine wood; chop a few pines (not fir) just inside the Black Forest for core wood). Make fire arrows and a buckler or shield, and cook up your meat into better food (cooked boar, deer, and neck - add a cooking station or two (roasting spit) to your campfire).

Kill Eikthyr with fire arrows, find some bees, collect the queens, decide on a good place for your first "real" base. Notes for a "good" location: a relatively flat area in the meadows, near (but not in) the Black Forest, and near water. Build/repair a house, add a bed, campfire, cooking stations (plural), and chests. Make beehives, collect some honey, then go into a few crypts and gather some yellow mushrooms and surtling cores. Build a kiln and a smelter, start making charcoal.

While you're building your base, use yellow mushrooms (from the burial chambers) and honey (from the beehives) to keep your health/stamina up. Not eating while building will kill you just as quickly and easily as going into combat without having eaten first.

Go deeper into the Black Forest, find some tin deposits on the ground near water. Gather 10 tin. Look at the big rocks in the area, watching for the shiny veins that indicate copper deposits. Mine at least 6 copper. Do this in the daytime, so you don't have to deal with the constant greydwarf spawns at night.

Return to base with your metal; smelt it. Use 6 copper to make a forge, and use the 10 tin to make a cauldron. Place the cauldron on a second campfire.
Mine more copper and tin. Smelt the metals, forge bronze, forge bronze gear (don't forget the cultivator), make better food in the cauldron (blueberries and raspberries for queen's jam, boar and honey for jerky). If you have carrots, make deer stew.

Make bronze nails. Build a cart and a Karve; those will come in handy in the very near future.

Make more fire arrows. Find and kill The Elder.

Make a fermenter (barrel), and start cooking up poison resist mead base and adding it to the fermenter. Once you have some poison resistance mead, go to the swamp with your new Swamp Key, and look for crypts.

All of that being said, a club and a loincloth is sufficient to deal with anything you'll encounter in the meadows; smacking bad things with a lit torch works much better than you would think, too... and carrying one keeps Meadows mobs from attacking at all.

Here are some more "general knowledge" style tips:

Don't sprint everywhere; save that for crossing clearings or running for your life. Look around more; moving slower lets you pay more attention to your surroundings so you don't sprint into a trio of greydwarves and then have no stamina with which to engage your "fight or flight" response.

Learn to block/parry; even unarmed, you can successfully block (and even parry) Meadows mobs. Setting greydwarves and skeletons on fire works a treat; trolls, too, but use your fire arrows instead of engaging in melee combat.

Keep at least 2, if not 3 foods in your "stomach". Eat more food as soon as the icon starts flashing (halfway through the stated duration); the health/stamina buff starts wearing off immediately after you've eaten, and you gain less benefit from the food as time passes. The buff is at less than 90% when the icon starts flashing, and is half depleted by the time the icon actually disappears. Keeping your food buffs up is a critical skill, and its value cannot be overstated; it's difference between running around with 25 hp and 50 stamina, and running around with 100+ of both. Food buffs also add health regeneration.

Watch your status effects.
Being cold (outside at night, for example) reduces your stamina regeneration. So does being wet... and those effects stack; if you're cold and wet, you're going to have a rough time.

Stay rested; the "resting" and "rested" buffs also stack, and do amazing things for your health and stamina regeneration. Adding furniture to your base will increase your "comfort", which increases the duration of the "rested" buff. You can eventually keep the "rested" buff through an entire day, if you have enough nice stuff in your house.

Nearly everything you do makes "noise", which draws the attention of mobs. See https://valheim.fandom.com/wiki/Creature_senses#Noise
The salient points are that the "noise" originates from your character, depletes by 5m per second, and it moves with you; for example, chopping down a tree means your character is attracting nearby creatures for the next 25 seconds, even if you move elsewhere... and running around generates noise, too.