I now see why so many people quit this game mid-way through

I love this game, but there are so many inexcusable frustrations in it. My girlfriend's character has lower stats than my son's character. Its not because he plays more….. nope, its specifically because she plays more. The punishment for dying is OBNOXIOUS. I was really hoping to be purist and actually play though this game as intended but 90% of my deaths are from glitching on terrain or becoming totally helpless because I run out of stamina for various absurd reasons. The stamina system in this game is clever and horrible all at the same time. I am going to have to go with mods though to keep playing. Its also been hard to get my son to play because he can't just go out and do anything because there's always some crap that kills him and all we end up doing is body recovery all the time. Might as well rename this game to "Body Recovery Simulator". This game was so much better early on when we could actually build up stats and not get one-shotted by wolves out of nowhere or die because I ran out of stamina for the 1000th time and can't freakin jump over a pebble if my life literally depends on it.

I just realized I spend 75% or more of my time in this game recovering bodies. Just getting punished brutally for trying to get my stuff back. If I make a second set of gear to recover the first; then I just lose that and have that much more to recover. I love the farming, the building, and so much more about this game, but the pacing and balance is just a mess. The idea that the biomes are fixed difficulty and that the player must adapt to survive them is great, but the implementation is so goofy. Every time I discover something new and get happy about it something bad happens; I glitch out and lose it, or my new tame wolves glitch out and get killed, or I glitch on terrain and spend the next 6 hours of real time trying to recover my stuff. I can't remember the last time a game inspired this much rage in me. I am known to be a calm person generally and this game has literally had me screaming at times. Just not worth trying to experience this game as-is anymore.

Anyway I am still trying to get my server working. I can't figure out how to make it so I can connect to the server from the same computer its running on. I want the server to use my LAN adapter IP and my client to use my WIFI IP, but I don't know how to make it happen. If I can get it working I want to run Valheim+ and Gizmo, but I don't know what other mods I should install. What will help me actually get to play this game instead of spending all my time recovering bodies?