Great to see this well organized with clear goals and stats to work with, great job

I fought a "senior veteran ground squirrel"

I took my armor off so I could see what the values would be like verse a new player.

He was dealing 8.60 damage per hit without my armor, while having 5.35 with some not great armor.

I "think" he had 36hps but I'm not sure since I cannot see the hp on a dead body due to the top hp bar being gone and the hp bar above the creature not displaying the hp number. 36hps feels good, I equipped a 65q knife and did 4 damage per hit, this felt around what it should be, my knives are 5 skill and I'm just beyond the active player strength ratio at 105str.

So it feels like the health is in the right point, however, the damage, for new players, may be too high for some of the smaller creatures.

For example, if this squirrel was to fight a 45hp new player, the squirrel would kill the player in 6 hits while the player would take 7-8 hits with a knife, possibly 4 hits with a shovel and somewhere inbetween for a club or axe. Since their damage over time, or dps should all be the same, really what needs to be balanced is so that a new player can kill one of these weaker creatures before dying themselves with a acceptable measure of user error since they could miss or something.

I feel like for this squirrel the damage could be cut in half, since 4-5 damage would still be fairly fearsome to a 45hp player, they would most likely need to recover after fighting one before fighting a 2nd one, this should be the goal of balance, not enough to kill but enough that they will need to heal after (a decent fight)

Its hard for me to say exactly what the damage should be since we're talking about flat damages here, not damage per second. DPS would be easier to balance since you could slow down more powerful attacks or speed up weaker attacks to get the same total damage over time or damage per second aka DPS.