Originally posted by Ranbato:

The difficulty jumps from one biome to the next are a bit too much. There is also no clear path to "getting better". Either endlessly grind or endlessly collect your corpse.

Hey, the game is what it is. I hope you can believe me that with time, you will develop methods that work well for casual.

In the previews of upcoming game content they show a difficulty slider, so you can tone it down to easy until you get comfortable, and ramp it up when you feel feisty.

FireSpark81 did a pretty good job discussing the Ashlands update on his youtbe channel (vids are about 4 mos old, but the Ashlands content is still under development).