Clockwork Mind

Woah, I knew it was a small dev team, but had no idea it was this small. Thank you, that puts all of this into better perspective.

I was hoping for something a bit more immersive, on the level of using a rope or handheld food, but I suppose the slightly janky cages are preferable to the gameplay void of the base game. How is this still a problem that needs mods to fix it? Animal husbandry is a whole mechanical system that's tied into the main progression. How is there still such a big hole in this gameplay loop, and why does the community just seem to accept it? I don't want to seem ungrateful to the devs, who seem to be working really hard to prioritize development time, I'm just confused that the community doesn't talk more about this. It seems like a really big oversight to just accept as the way things are, like if Minecraft didn't let you craft Sticks, and you could only get them from loot chests.

I've read from the survival guide and forum posts that herding animals requires luring them with leapfrogging food troughs, or hurting them to use their aggression/fear. I've also read from posts last year that people were wishing for ropes to be able to attach to animals and pull them around. Is this really still the only way to do this? It seems utterly insane (borderline unacceptable) to be playing a game that features a wide open world and animal husbandry, and yet the only way to move them is by spending actual real hours abusing their existing pathfinding. Am I missing a newer feature in the game? Is there an up-to-date mod that adds some kind of actual lure or leash that I wasn't able to find in my mod search?

Is the timer shown in the player's inventory accurate? Since it seems that additional multiplier isn't shown on held items, I'd hope that the temperature modifier doesn't apply there.

I'd thought about this early-on as well. Thirst is one of those survival mechanics that can be very interesting and deep, but is so easy to just make into a Tedium Meter. It needs to be more than just a timer on how frequently you need to take a swig from a water jug, no matter how dynamic and interconnected that timer is. This game's Hunger system works because of the variety of the food groups, and how they all tie into different ways of making food, which are themselves tied into major progression mechanics like farming, milling, and preservation. Thirst would need to do something similar, with things like juices being more valuable to drink than just water, soups and stews getting their own hydration value to incentivize cooking them, higher-tiered water containers like leather waterskins and metal canteens, and probably either very streamlined and infrequent manual water collection in the later-game, or fully automatable water collection + storage, to ensure that even hundreds of hours of dealing with hydration doesn't become a major annoyance. It also ties into other aspects of the game like World Generation. If water becomes a vital survival resource like food, then you'll want to have it relatively nearby wherever you decide to settle. The thing is, simple food is easy to forage on the fly anywhere, and seeds/bushes are easy to relocate to your home. Will the same be true for water? Will a player's choice in home location be constrained by the random fluctuations of procedural generation? Would people stop exploring/settling in deserts because they're too much of a pain? Buckets currently require access to smithing, which is a not-insignificant progression gate for something as vital as hydration. Would water relocation have to become easier, and what other parts of the game would that affect? It's a big and complicated topic. While I would absolutely love to see my dream-version of a Thirst mechanic implemented, actually doing so would be really hard to pull off, and I'd understand if the devs ultimately decide that a Thirst mechanic just wouldn't be worth trying to implement, and focus on other things instead.