Hell nah. I play on hard. I want a challenge.
I don’t find it that hard to stay alive. I still get whacked every now and then when I’m not attentive but it doesn’t happen often.
My son says that peaceful is the hardest mode, and hard is the easiest, because you get more resources faster in “hard” mode.
I play in “normal” because I had a bad experience early on with zombies breaking through my door and killing me in the middle of the night. It was like a scene from a movie. And I’m clumsy, and find it easier to deal with a few monsters at a time than with lots. (Honestly, I’ve mostly avoided monsters. Lots of lights, lots of beds, lots of walls.) But I’m happy to have a working skeleton experience farm handy by to my enchanting room. And I’m happy to have my string farm for cash. Neither would work in peaceful mode.
(The iron farm would work fine in peaceful mode. One of my goals is to avoid torturing villagers.)
I don’t wait witches to show up! I head straight into the heart of their mucky swamps and murder them in their huts because I want to steal their cute little black kitties! Muwahahahahahaha! 
You don’t need to confront the witch to steal her cat. I’m actually planning to take a black cat in the not-too-distant future to complete my set of cats.
How do you kill the witch, though? I’ve had pretty bad luck with witches. Sometimes they kill me, and sometimes i escape, but i haven’t killed one yet.
I try to stay out of potion-tossing range and shoot them with arrows. You just have to keep hitting them faster than they can drink their healing potions. When you complete your set of cats, you’ll get the crazy cat lady achievement!
Yup, that’s my goal!
I want to get the cat achievement, and the wanderlust achievement. (Visiting every biome.)
Minecraft came out in 2011, so I probably last played it in 2009 or 2010, when it was still in beta and you could buy it cheap as a “backer” type thing. The game is still going strong without me, so of course my eldest expressed interest in playing. My feat is that I was able to recover a 12 year old account by digging through old emails and using password recovery. Microsoft long since bought the property, but they’ll convert your Mojang account over.
Wow! I’m impressed. I had trouble converting my current, active account to Microsoft.
The single most useful find for me was a skeleton spawner that I used to build an XP farm— then I could build an altar and create OP gear to my hearts content.
The nether is much more fun if your gear allows you to swim in lava:)
I cheated and used chunkbase to find a skeleton spawner early on. I’m really sad that they never updated their dungeon finder to work with version 1.18
But i didn’t realize any gear allowed you to swim in lava.
You can change the drop-item key in the options.
~Max
I didn’t know they had huts and wouldn’t know how to steal a cat.
The fundamental problem is that I am a lousy typist, and don’t reliably hit the button I want to hit. I don’t think remapping them will fix that. I sometimes mine when I mean to craft, and vice versa, too. 
A witch’s hut is special kind of monster-spawner. If you kill the witch, another one will generate. But witch’s huts are also the only source of black cats. (All the other ones spawn in villages.) You steal a cat by taming it, which is to say, by feeding it raw fish. Then it will follow you. I suppose you could also steal it by putting it into a boat or a minecart, but there’s not much value in that. Whereas a tame cat can be used to breed kittens, can be positioned to protect your structures (or you) from creepers, and brings you gifts at night. Well, that last may not be an advantage, as it can clutter your inventory with junk. But it is a way to get string in peaceful mode. And some of the other gifts can be useful, as well.
Grrr, trying to find a librarian who sells soul speed. I guess it’s not a common enchantment.
Also looking for frost walker. And power. And maybe blast protection, just to complete my collection of “protection” spells.
puzzlegal - 
My sincerest apologies for daring to suggest that you needed a wiki.
I regret that I don’t have anything more to add. My history with long-running games is for one incredibly brief shining moment I love them, and they get progressively harder and more overcomplicated and more painful… and at each step some doe-eyed rookie jumps in and says “Ooh, this is fun!” and my jaw drops another quarter inch. I remember a time when you were considered a degenerate if you could last ten minutes at Asteroids. Now run-of-the-mill players are putting hits on witches and gunning down golems and carving up the Nether like absolutely nothing. The bar’s been super-high since at least the PS3/XBox 360 era, but now it’s halfway to Mars.
Your stories are fascinating, though, and I’d love to hear more! Let us know how that nether expedition went, okay? 
The only thing that could possibly bring me back, unfortunately, are the codes. Thus far I’m only aware of the GameFAQs list, which consists of one killer-ish code and a whole bunch of extraordinary fleeting effects. Believe me when I say that I’m going to need most of this stuff to stick around for way longer than a miserly 255 seconds. What would really help to this end is if it were possible to punch them in while the game was paused, to take off the time pressure…I don’t want this to turn into a speed-typing exercise. Could someone confirm that this is possible? Something like water breathing or regeneration should work fine.
The wiki is awesome! Everyone should be told the wiki exists. No apologies needed.
My world is pretty tame. I’ve mostly set things up so i don’t need to fight. That’s why I’m afraid of the nether. 
I’d be happy to give you a tour sometime. I set up a little hut near spawn with some beds and basic resources in it, so if you arrive at night you can run indoors and hide.
But I’m playing Java edition, so i don’t know if those cheat codes work. Also, they aren’t what I’m looking for in the game.
If you want an easy mode, the best way to play is normal or hard difficulty, but turn “keep inventory” on. So you can manage resources and farm and all theb fun stuff, but if you die, you just wake up in bed with all your stuff. Highly, highly recommended foe servers with children, because if they kill each other in a rage or a prank gone wrong, it’s really not a big deal.
We’ve played on and off for years, but during the pandemic we started watching various people on the Hermitcraft server and that upped my game tremendously. So much more is possible than i ever dreamed.
I finally went back and read your post. Wow, was it that much easier back in the day?
I mostly play it as a giant Lego set, or as a puzzle game to build the items i am looking for. And i mostly avoid monsters. But i realized at some point that the existence of monsters gives the game an edge, and makes it more exciting than just Legos.
I’m not trying to get all the achievements. Some i will get, others just aren’t in a direction i enjoy going. Like…i don’t think I’ll ever get “kill every monster”. But i may get “breed every animal”, even though that will ultimately require dealing with hoglins.
But also, i wanted to tell you that while spiders are the canonical way to get string, you can also get string from cats.
So, I finally checked out the nether. My son went with me, which was good, because one of the first things that happened was that a ghast put out the portal, and I hadn’t thought to bring flint and steel, But he was able to barter with piglins, and re-light the portal.
Other than that, it wasn’t as scary as I had feared. There’s still the “maps don’t work” problem. I think I will bring a lot of stone to build paths for myself, so I can find my way “home”. We started in the soul sand desert, where there isn’t much valuable. (although I may build some elevators now that I have soul sand.) We wandered off to an area that looked like the old-style nether, and (mostly he) mined some nether quartz. So now I can make redstone machines – something that’s hard to do without quartz. He also built me a little prototype of a melon & pumpkin farm, something he’s been trying to get me to build for a while. I’ve been pretty satisfied selling string to fletchers for cash, but I suppose I should humor him and build it. I also want to build something to sort the crap I get from killing skeletons (in my skeleton experience farm), not so much because I need to sort that crap, or do anything with it, honestly, but because it will be a fun puzzle to solve to learn to use redstone stuff.
Eventually I want to get comfortable with the nether, and hunt for blaze rods… Which means I need to explore a place I can’t map, which may be extremely challenging. I may try to get the “visit every overworld biome” achievement, first. But… I do really want to build ender chests.