This is a game about milestones. Everything is a chore or outright impossible until you reach the area where you can get whatever you were struggling with easily.
First up, food. You gotta kill rats for meat, but you take damage so you have to eat the meat to heal, so you have to kill more rats.
It's a pain, but after you get a couple of decent pieces of leather armour, farming meat becomes trivial. Once you get the fishing net, you get free fish every day. Also, once you get to the settlement you can buy food, and just steal it in the same safe-area where you sleep, so it's trivial.
iron and stone are a pain in the ass, because your pick breaks after about two uses, but costs 1 iron to make.
You can find the respawning free pick, but it's still a pain because you only get two iron before it breaks.
Your clothes start breaking which means you need stone for repair kits, you need iron and stone for all upgrades, but you can't get any because you only get one pick per day (from the free spot) but your pick doesn't even last five uses.
Then you get the first durability upgrade for the pick, and suddenly you can use it 10+ times consistently. Now you can use your pick to gather the resources to make multiple other picks (and also kill thieves for iron, now that you have a metal weapon and can kill them in two turns) So gathering iron and stone becomes pretty much a non-issue.
I'm doing copper at the moment, but I fully expect it to turn out the same way when I find the right location.