Pestilence

Exploration and progression. The more ruins I have to dig through and the more resources I have to find or produce to enable myself to progress through the tech tree, the happier I am. I live in a dirt rectangle and I get bored when there's nothing left to achieve.

Ok now it's starting to make sense. Your problem isn't wolves. You are playing on a potato. Memory isn't how you tell if your computer is high-end. Memory doesn't increase performance. The only effect memory has on performance is when you don't have enough and the lack of it slows you down.

As a person who treats every run as if it was hardcore and tries very hard not to die at all ever, I feel like if you're dying literally hundreds of times per world, your problem is optimism, not enemies. Without great armor, you don't stand a chance against a sheep, much less a wolf, without employing some kind of other strategy that negates your weaknesses.

Why are you going around picking fights with a dozen wolves if you only have emergency armor? It's supposed to help you get away from wolves, not massacre entire packs of them.

Why would you go without armor in the early game? It's literally firewood and grass.

I don't have any problem with wolves because I don't ever settle near them and their spawn points seem to never change. They also aren't very difficult to run from and they are easily killed with spears in water. That said, the existing hyena behavior would be perfect as a realistic change to wolf behavior.

The game shows all the things you can do with a bucket of water while you're holding it if you have interaction hints turned on (N key, by default, I believe)

Yeah the saw does it too, but you need an anvil to make a saw, so the sword was the first thing that could do it.

If you play on a multiplayer server, time passes always, whether you are connected or not. That means every time you log on, odds are good that all your stored food will be rotten.

If you wanted to remove some blocks from a redwood without chopping the whole tree down, for instance to make a treehouse out of it, a sword was a good way to do that.

I mean, come on. That's gorgeous and it would be a travesty to change it.

In my opinion, the clouds are one of the best visual effects in the game, and the game is full of great visual effects, so that's saying a lot. I think it would be a travesty to change them.

You can also just place rocks on open full blocks (like knapping) to block spawns. Drifters have always been able to spawn on the same block as the player during temporal storms. That's not new in 1.16.

Install the ProspectorInfo mod and try it.

Well you certainly seem to have a unique play style. Personally, I'm glad the game isn't designed specifically for it. I think variety is nice and I'm willing to temporarily settle early in Fort Dirt™ and rush flax and a saw to support it before I decide where to permanently reside.