I have three seeds I play on. One is build (where I cheat the heck out of everything), one is normal game play (no cheats), the other is a hard rule set of my own decision with no cheats. All are modded with minor QoL and textures.

On a regular game I died a lot on my first couple days vanilla. I restarted after the elder and I'm around day 300 on one seed and I've only died three times? All to my own stupidity of course.... I am still searching for swamps in this seed. They are very rare.

On the more recent hard setting one... if a character dies, then I make another character in that seed. If the new one happens across a dead body with some goodies... then it's fair game to grab em. However, the chances are a brand new character isn't going to get to the goodies so easily. The goal is to go as many days as I can without being stupid, impatient or trying to be lazy to which this game can punish all three conditions quite severely. So far I'm on character three. First two had to deal with a skeleton at spawn. Now I'm 20-30 days in I think. On the hunt for burial chambers and a build site in the forest.