I hope the next update will start fleshing out the early/mid-game experience

[labtop 215]

It would be nice if harvesting a body with no loot on it didn't drain 3 durability from your knife anyway.  Having said that, you can stick to just using crappy stone knives to harvest drifters, or whatever easily acquired knife you have on hand to harvest surface drifters.  Once you have a few temporal gears at your disposal, the minimal gears and flax fibers from surface drifters just aren't worth the durability loss on better knives.  (I still end up harvesting them anyway out of habit though.)