I can't agree with this comment enough.
I finally picked this game up about six months ago. I get very little time to play, but I sneak in a short session when I can.

I told myself from the start that I wouldn't look up any information, just let the game take me where it goes, and I've had a blast. Even times when it's been an absolute bitch running back to collect my gear after getting stomped on.

I’ve heard good things about valheim but only in the context of playing with multiple people. Is solo much different / is the game built for solo or teams?

I played just enough to be denied a refund. Not my cup of tea at all.

I haven't played in a bit but vanilla inventory pisses me off.

Not the size but the lack of quick stuff. I hear they patched QuickStore so you can quickly dump matching items from inventory to a chest you're looking at.

Gather wood. Hit carry weight limit.
Walk to build site. Build workbench and chest. Open chest. Put away wood.
Repeat more trips to chop more wood and open chest to store. Build a few more. Chests and fill those. (I do 2 - 4 chests)
House time. Take out wood. Build. Repeat small reload mat trips until done with build.

Crafting? Gather all the mats you need from chests and hit the workstation.

I use mods.

Quickstore - press a key and matching items from your inventory auto store into nearby chests. Go adventure and come home, hit a key to dump inv into matching chests and sleep/save/quit.

CraftFromContainers - auto pull resources from nearby containers for building, crafting, cooking and more.

They're just QoL mods that save me organizational time and let me play the game. It's been a year tho.

I used to use a few other QoL mods. Vanilla gameplay with GUI or time saving bits.

Weight based encumbrance with slots, but you’ll generally cap out weight before slots. Depending on your wold seed and/or base building tolerance level, it’s either a constant struggle or not bad to deal with - juggling stamina and food is the bigger grind imo.

Tbh as a busy adult, there’s a select few quality of life mods that make it less tedious but still keeps the reward:challenge payoff. Some of the much more useful items can’t be taken through portals, and I’d highly recommend modding that OUT for sanity/time sink reasons.

There are mods that alleviate its problems, but in Vanilla Valheim (Vanilheim, if you will)... ehhh.
I always managed to organize chests into somewhat sensible categories, but in the first half of the game's progression chests are ~tiny~.

You do get to yeet carts full of ore from mountaintops, though.

On the upside you rarely need a large number of different mats to make aomething, but it can be annoying to organize and since you can build better chests that hold more over time you might end up needing to reorganize stuff every couple biomes if you collect a lot of extra stuff as you go.

But you don't have to do it all at once either. Just make the new containers as needed and remove the old ones when space is needed. You can always build more house!

Disclaimer: have not played in a few years. So this answer is only true for a state of game from before the mistlands update (November/December 2022)

You will have a lot of chests with a lot of stuff. Inventory management is part of the game. You can not carry metal (heavy and important) through portals and are forced to transport them yourself. You will have limited inventory space. You will basically move through tiers of materials (woods, metals etc), but low tier materials will never be obsolete, so you need to store a lot.

That being said: it is all worth it. Your stuff can be destroyed you drop your stuff on death and it makes moving through dangerous parts of the map a lot more exciting and challenging.