Streetwind

The dedicated server will sit in its own folder. One of the subfolders will be called "Data". Inside that, there will be a subfolder called "Mods". That's where downloaded mod files should be placed. You get the files from the official ModDB, using the regular download link (not the "1-click install"). Do not unzip anything, just put the mods there exactly as downloaded. Start the server once, wait until it has loaded into the default world, then shut it down again. Now, another subfolder "ModConfig" will have generated. Inside there you can change settings for the various mods that offer this.

No, it does nothing without other players to interact with it.

Each update cycle usually starts with a long period of silent work in the background. Then at some point, we get a public prerelease version, which will be highly unstable and not recommended to make actual serious playthroughs with. New prerelease versions tend to come fairly quickly after that as issues are fixed. After a number of prereleases, we eventually get a release candidate build, which will be almost good enough. It will likely also update several times. Then, finally, we will get a stable build as an official release (and then the post-release hotfixes and patches start). Based on past experience, the time between the first prerelease and the stable build tends to be around two months. Meaning, as long as you're not yet seeing any prerelease builds, the update is at least two months away.

What I meant was that nothing prevents a berry bush from flowering at any time of the year, and even multiple times in the same year, as long as temperatures allow it. Whereas the trees either outright target specific date ranges or effectively do so due to how they react to spring, and they're strictly once-per-year deals. Maybe "seasonal" was just the wrong word for it. You seem to know more about this than me, though. If I understood you right, the game does try to give trees a chance to vernalize and/or flower at their preferred times even before world start, but because they're spawned young, vernalization gets skipped? I suppose that lines up even better with OPs observation that sourthern trees flower and fruit fine, since they cannot be too young for something they don't do in the first place...

In older versions, fruit trees never flowered or produced fruit in their first year. 1.22 was supposed to fix this, though. "Fixed: Wild fruit trees not fruiting in the first year", says the changelog. That unfortunately doesn't give us much to work with. We don't know what was 'broken', and we don't know what the fix was. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that berry bushes aren't seasonal. They cycle through flowering and fruiting on a timer that keeps running as long as the ambient temperature is high enough. That means their state can be effortlessly randomized at world start. Fruit trees, on the other hand, are very much seasonal. They flower exactly once a year, during a specific window of time. For the vernalizing trees, that is after they come out of winter dormancy, so usually sometime in April. For the southern evergreens, it's a range from February to April, except for oranges. The game starts on May 1st. And time before that date is not simulated. Because you need a fruiting stage to produce a harvest, and you need a flowering stage to enter a fruiting stage, it's possible that a tree that didn't get a chance to flower because April didn't exist, will skip its entire cycle for the first year. Meanwhile, orange trees start flowering in June. So those should be absolutely fine, and that sort of lines up with your observation of southern trees that bloom in year 1. They are the only ones to bloom that late, though. All of this is based on my speculation, mind you. I'm trying to think up a best guess as to why it isn't working. That doesn't mean that what I thought up is actually correct.

As the description of the screenshot mentions, it's from the #screenshots channel on the official VS Discord. Almost all of the patch notes and blog post title images are. The devs pick something they like and feature it for all to see. Which, by extension, means that you can find and contact Cygnus656 on Discord. Click the "Chat" button in the navigation bar at the top of the website, it'll lead you to the server.

Yep. Or rather, sleeping makes you less... less hungry. Standing around has an extremely small hunger multiplier, specifically set this low in order to protect players going AFK without pausing (such as on multiplayer servers). This has the unfortunate side effect that even sleeping consumes more satiety

That's old info, debunked by a dev. See https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Satiety#Nutrition_delay, and the references it links to.

Granite areas also guarantee igneous rocks top to bottom, making it really easy to find tin, zinc, and bismuth for progression to the bronze age. By comparison, that tends to be something that a "lucky" player who started in a limestone area tends to struggle with.

You'd be surprised how common that is. I've had multiple worlds like that.

The "temporary buff" is just a hidden amount of bonus satiety that you get from eating claypot meals or pies. Hence, if you do something that consumes a lot of satiety quickly (sprinting, regenerating health), it won't last long. If you're sitting still or sleeping, your hunger rate is reduced quite a bit, and so it lasts longer. So there aren't really any optimization strategies here. You don't "get more out of the temporary buff" by acting in certain ways, because it's not a timed status you have. It's a consumable resource.

There are so many different resources you need for progression that it is pretty much guaranteed that not all of them will be in the vicinity of where you settled. You'll always have to strike out and find something far afield. That's intentional, by the way. It's just that sometimes, it's something you need somewhat early on (like ingredients for leatherworking), and sometimes, it's something you'll need in the lategame (like bauxite).

Anything not maple

Perhaps food could continue to follow the current, classic "eat or die" model, while a drink system could follow the more modern "Valheim" model where it doesn't matter if you don't consume but you're heavily incentivized to do it because of the advantages you get when you do.

The wiki has information on each structure's typical spawn distances. However, most of them follow a pattern of "within x thousand blocks around Y", where Y can be the world spawn or another story structure, depending on the case. That might help, but probably not that much.