I think people can handicap themselves to give them more of a challenge

For instance, I currently am doing a challenge in my newest playthrough. I am doing all the bosses, but my goal is to only use a knife, a hammer, a crude bow, and an axe to fell trees. I have made a rule to not lay down portals, I can only build bases to a max size of 6x6, and I'm not going to smelt much metal at all. I cannot dig trenches around my bases, and I can't stay in one spot for more than it takes to get the rested bonus.

So what's the plan? Building a wolf army or something.

I died five times between killing Eikthyr with just a hammer (setting him ablaze with campfires), and going in melee between his attacks with a knife. only died three times during the boss fight, died an additional two times when I made it to the black forest and ran into a zillion mobs.

I think the mobs scale pretty fine until you become OP from just gathering tons of mats and making end game gear. Then there's no more scaling...but from the devcommands you can spawn up to ten star mobs I think, so it might be in the cards in the future for tougher mobs.