RedVanGhoul

The mod xSkills sort of does this. Doing certain actions gives XP towards a related skill group. For example, chopping down trees gives XP towards forestry and then you can pick skills from forestry to either speed up your chopping, get more saplings, use less durability on your axe, etc.

Greek plantations full of grapes and whatever else they wanted to make into wine. That may not have had combine harvesters, but they had huge fields of crop

I haven't tried 1.20-pre yet, but I'm pretty excited for the mount and sailboat systems. Seeing that some of the creative only blocks also include wheels (I assume for trader wagons) I thought maybe something we might see later on would be a craftable cart that could be pulled by our noble steed (or our poor buddies who we tricked into buying this game). Could make nomadic life overland a lot cooler.

Along similar lines to this: I think it would be great if you could cause an animal to bleed out. Stick it with a spear or arrow and it will start leaving a blood trail and slowly lose health over time til it dies.

Trimming sails just means adjusting the sails to catch the wind correctly. It usually involves tightening them when sailing upwind so you get an airfoil. I sail a bit IRL. Don't cut the sails. They are kinda expensive.

Judging by he size, would it be safe to assume that the boat can hold several people and maybe even have an inventory? Joy of Sailing is one of my favorite mods, but I can't wait to check out the new sailboat.

xSkills had mentioned 0.8.4 as the prerequisite (forgot to download it when I loaded the first time). Does 0.8.5-pre 1 fix this multiplayer issue then? I'll have to give it a try, thanks!

I looked around through this forum post as well as the ModDB comments and I've seen a couple people with similar issues but I didn't see any fixes for it (sorry if you've already replied to them, I just didn't see them) I was running xSkills 0.8.7 and xLib 0.8.4 along with several other mods just fine as singleplayer, but when I opened to Lan to allow some friends to play they would immediately crash to desktop when trying to connect to my world, receiving an error message mentioning an issue with xLib. Unfortunately, my friends are just a tad computer illiterate so I haven't been able to get any more info out of them. Everything works fine without xLib and xSkills installed. My current mod list, in case it would help. Keep in mind, it all works great for me in singleplayer, it just won't allow people to join in multi.

Part of the issue I have with classes is that there aren't enough, or rather there aren't any that I would actually want to play. There is a hunter, but no miner. There is a tinkerer but no blacksmith. I understand that there are class mods out there, but sometimes they don't play nice with other mods. What would be neat to see instead is a system to choose your own traits at character creation, similar to Project Zomboid or Abiotic Factor. Negative traits give you points that can then be spent on Positive traits. That way you wouldn't need to add extra classes, but instead have the players design their own to fit what they want to do. Adding some sort of growing skill system like xSkills would also benefit this a lot, as you could make traits that affect those skills.