They have recently adjusted the drop rate to be properly depressing and slowing the progression down to a good pace. It takes you around 10-20 hours to get to the point where you can start building a proper base, then it's a matter of defending it from Zombies, or if online, from pricks. There is a LOT of crafting, building, cooking, medicine and maintenance recipes to find in books. At 25.25 hrs on my most recent character/world I finally found a sniper rifle. I took it apart to make molds of the parts I was missing molds for. Now I can be certain I can build a sniper rifle should I lose mine. The game makes you think about things like that early in the game too.
I would also like to say the dev group is fantastic. Compare that to the D-bag that runs Forsaken Uprising. First of all, that game is absolute trash with a bunch of sloppy premade scripts thrown together with generic purchased Unity store models and a terrible netcode. It's made worse by their underhanded practices of removing all negative reviews or comments from their forums on their website or Steam. They can't get rid of the reviews though, which are about 80 to 5 saying it's terrible. Avoid it like the plague.