base game is nice but the mods take it to another tier

An incredibly solid base and structure for the mechanics of a survival sandbox, unfortunately that's ultimately ruined by poor and cheap ways of implementing challenge.
it may be partly due to item loss, but every death has felt cheap nonetheless. overtime combat ability and stats haven't improved very quickly and just existing is frustrating because enemies are scattered everywhere to overwhelm you, the baseline difficulty is just anxiety inducing and i didn't sign up to play this as a survival horror.
Losing all items on death, amplified with losing more important ones like your healing and your upgrade items, its yet another game that falls into this dumb gameplay loop of trying to retrieve lost items and dying over and over again, the horror of dying is that death can cost half an hour or more if you're unlucky, not to mention if you die from the core of the planet those items are just gone forever (which i learned the hard way).
Its made a lot worse because you can easily die on the other side of a planet from which you even spawn, and you're not fast. any game you can compare this one to handles movement a lot better, someone in this dev team really had the idea that you cant double jump while sprinting.
Also... by god... the fall damage
At least half of my deaths haven't even been from actual obstacles and have been from fall damage. within 12 hours of gameplay i haven't seen any proper fall damage protection like other sandbox survival games have had, the most you get is a well timed double jump (when you unlock it), but this game more than any others makes maps with incredibly steep hills, cascading caverns, and enemy SKYSCRAPERS for NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ REASON in a game where the screen is zoomed the ♥♥♥♥ in and you fall too fast to even tell when you're about to land. if you compare this to Terraria the difference is absurd, that game has an incredibly outstretched screen and a decently low fall speed cap, you could easily land a double jump under those conditions and even then, fall damage is noticeably less of an issue, early game items remove it and dying on the base difficulty doesn't create such a t e r r i b l e g a m e p l a y l o o p . in this game you don't even get rope for your hellevator so you have to place platforms and repeatedly press and let go of down to not splatter at the bottom at mach speed.

I'm so distraught because like, I reeaally want to like this game, i'm thinking of looking at mods to see what I can improve here, but when i'm already ditching base game there's clearly something wrong.
At the end of the day, I've gotten nowhere near where I should be at from how much I've put into the game and playing it is just starting to piss me off.

It's okay.