*waggles hand* You can get your standard (and gold) chests and fish out of surface forest biome lakes, plus a few small other things (frog legs, zephyr fish, bomb fishes, double-jump fish). The really good stuff is found in other places, though. Either underground, or in ocean/jungle/corruption/hallow/sky/etc. Ocean's probably the easiest to immediately deal with/reach, and can give you some fairly improved (by which I mean just about the best pre-hardmode that exist) utility items (pickaxe, axe). If you're having trouble reaching the place, just mine up some iron/lead and wood, craft a few stacks of minecart track, and build yourself an easy route, heh. Or dig, I guess, but that's only a really viable choice for someone that already has late-game pickaxes, honestly.
As to your earlier question about how to take the sting out of exploration, saph, and making the enemies less scary... cheat. Would be my suggestion. Cheat engine trivially finds your current HP and freezes it, making pretty much everything at-most time consuming. It's also pretty easy to find your cash, specific ore stacks, the list just kind of goes on, and set them to whatever amount you please. Think there's already some inventory editing stuff available on the terraria forums, too. If the game's not exactly what you want to play, make it be that way :V