I gave it a try recently and it appears that there's absolutely no experience balancing going on. I am so confused why you're adding new systems when you haven't even established a consistent game loop. If all you want to do is add events then take the survival mechanics out. If you want the survival mechanics to add a sense of pressure then balance it. Clearly you're playing with debug options on and setting stats during your testing.
I go gathering and then my hands are full and there's no way to empty them meanwhile I'm starving. And I keep getting events that either add mouths to feed or present puzzles, that don't yet have solutions. Or at least the solutions require building a small civilization first.
Balance is pretty low priority right now, I'm mostly just trying to get the core systems working. No point fine tuning and then having to redo it all if the underlying mechanic gets replaced!
In the final game many events will give you an instant meal, not just fill your stores, so starving to death with full hands won't happen. Even so, I want every win to feel like a loss! When you find food you should be annoyed you didn't find crafting materials (and vice versa), and if you find a bounty of supplies you should feel like you're leaving most of them behind. Upgrading your gear and stores will reduce the frustration but comfort will always be out of reach (except for certain locations, such as the secondary base in Girlzilla's room)
If you're playing 0.4 things will seem especially bad and I've made some big changes in 0.5 to finalise the main mechanics. That work is mostly done, I'm just debugging now, so it might be worth waiting for the next public release (coming soon!)
Would you consider perhaps compromising? Instead of making it feature complete before balance, could you alternate between the two? Feature then balance, feature then balance. I promise you it will be much easier than trying to balance a very complex system. It will also help with perspective. As right now the beginning of the game is super option loaded. You've presented too many systems to the player that aren't even complete yet. You should design a tutorial. I think that would help you get perspective. Try to see your world as a new player would.
I actually think your desperation theme is really good. I've seen a few games that make the player feel desperate, and it makes the game more engaging. But if it feels unfair, you will lose the player's interest. I like the example of the barnacle from Half-Life. Or the first Gumba in Mario Brothers. These enemies are so easy to outmaneuver, but they've likely killed an embarrassing number of players. If you make it so the player feels embarrassed about their failure, they're more likely to anticipate it in the future. 3 steps forward, 2 steps back.