A few tips to make the game easier beside adjusting the sliders:
I've been playing for quite a few hours and noticed some things that weren't immediately obvious but might be helpful to some:
You can move your character between worlds freely, your ship and current inventory go with you. You can use this to "New Game +" if you want (quests are character-bound), or on the reverse, quickly progress a new character by setting up a cache full of gear for them.
Resource respawns appear to be on some kind of global timer not bound to in-game time, therefore you can hop between worlds to farm resources and by the time you're done on one, the other will have refreshed. It's a little cheesy but you're still having to spend time gathering and refining the resources, so I don't really consider it "cheating".
I can't understate how important upgrading your armor is. You're still pretty fragile compared to most enemies in the game but it does make a huge difference. There are also set bonuses that give you a huge bonus to HP and/or defense.
While you may drop certain harvestable items on death, your ship doesn't even if it gets sunk and you can retrieve them when you repair the ship, so store your items based on this when your inventories are getting full.
You can use heavy attacks on resource nodes with axes/pickaxes, letting you mine them a little faster and sometimes hit multiple nodes with one swing.
Later on in the game, you'll find guns that can hold multiple shots before reloading, so investing in gun skills can be decent later on.
This is also a much cheesier trick that's basically cheating, but here it is anyway: If you or your ship are about to die, log out and hop to another world where you aren't in danger and you can heal/repair then jump back to the other world and return to the fight.
EDIT: I don't know how I forgot to mention this one, but you can still build in combat on land. You can cheese the ever loving hell out of this and basically Fortnite your way through a ton of fights.