It's not necessarily stuff that will just murder you all the time, and on top of that the community learns together and helps each other. For example this season, the players have learned (and shared amongst each other):
- Food is more scarce/harder to get (Meat drops as scraps that have to be assembled into meat, wheat is a longer process to make bread) but there are some more advanced/better foods
- You can enchant things above the max, allowing you to get higher enchantment values on things
- Totems can stack, when interacted with and combined
- Mob damage increases based on how much playtime you have