This game can range from super easy to unforgivingly brutal depending on a few factors, yea. My brother and I recently started it up for our 2nd or 3rd time after months of updates, and we were breezing along until we explored a shipwreck on the moon and drones fucking wrecked our ship stealthily while we were away from it. So we're on the MOON with fuckall for backup resources because this was our beginner SV we cobbled together to go get moonrocks.
We had dug out a good part of that shipwreck so we ran back, set up a ghetto constructor and generator from salvaged parts, and eventually salvaged/found enough resources to rebuild an SV core to escape. Meanwhile we had almost no food and I used up all my spare O2 tanks, my brother managed to find a couple somewhere in the ship and ran them to me literally as I'm losing health from lack of air.
It was a long, arduous and largely unprofitable adventure, but goddamn it was an adventure! After that we took extras of EVERYTHING everywhere. I made a huge, double-thick armored CV with scattered storage and auto turrets and made an SV super armored up as well and small enough to keep close. What's crazy is in the couple months since all that, there's big a couple more big updates and arguably we could start over again. It seems like the game updates both a lot but also slowly... the core game has hardly changed but the Minecrafty-ness of it keeps growing.