Maelstrom

Anything is possible with proper modding. You may want to check out the QPTech mod.

I've been seeing a lot of streamers/youtubers place rocks to prevent non-storm spawns.

Must... not... break... immersion. =D Seriously, that would be awesome! I hardly ever check my secondary monitor for IRL time, leading to ending the game hours after I intended to stop.

You dug down 20 blocks for your foundry? Pretty sure the game considers that a cave and will spawn drifters regardless or rifts or temporal storms.

Currently there is no difference between any of the coal options for the cementation furnace. I expect that in a future update (maybe even the 1.17 de-jank update) that will change. At this time it would take a mod to change the cementation furnace requirements.

The alternative is what I was thinking you meant - mining voxels to get the same number of nuggets as produced in current mining mechanic.

Consider that the default pole to equator distance is 100,000 blocks, it doesn't surprise me you traveled so far for such a small change in climate.

Went back to re-read your OP and saw that a single block would likely produce multiple nuggets. So, I was wrong that it would be more tedious, but their is a problem that your idea would compress ores to a small number of blocks (making prospecting even more difficult) or inflating the resource node to potentially ridiculous amounts (a single surface copper node providing copper for literally decades of play, never mind iron deposits).

In my experience animals (including drifters) are prohibited from walking on the top of fences. My 1.15 drifter pit was one block deep with a ring of fences on the inside of the pit. Upgraded my world to 1.16 and in the first drifter invasion I ran to my drifter pit and watched the drifter conga line's futility to walk over the fence.

Thinking about the premise of this idea, I'm thinking that mining voxels out of the block would make mining even more tedious thereby decreasing the fun factor.

Be aware that the devs do not visit the forums very much and comment even less. Bumping threads does not have the impact you hope it does. I understand they the devs are more active on the VS discord.

I believe there is a setting in game to convert the temp in the character screen to F, but that does not carry over to the temp in seed description.

Well that gets my creativity going. Craft an anti-spawn device activated for a short time by temporal gears. Hmmmm.... Perhaps a gear is good for a few hours with a half-life type of falloff of protection. After two hours the protection starts decreasing from 7 block radius to a 6 block radius, 60 minutes later it goes down to a 5 block radius, 30 minutes later another block, etc. As the protection wanes so does the glow indicating the device's active life. At a low level it gives off nearly no glow making it difficult to determine if it should be reactivated or wasting some time reactivating it prematurely.

Some mods create animals for pet purposes. Not sure about how to close all chests with a key bind though. Other more techie people will have to confirm what can be done.

Useful Stuff has a pottery oven for firing clay items. For charcoal? You can build a charcoal pit out of stone based material and block the entrance with dirt. I would love to see an iron door used to seal a charcoal pit, but nobody has implemented that, to my knowledge.

Rifts appear randomly and will eventually disappear. The rift activity (in your character screen) will show the level of drifter spawning from rifts. If you hover over the save file in the welcome screen you can see that world's settings. A lot of those can be changed by server commands within the game.

I'd like to see greater customization to temporal storms. Currently strength and frequency are included in the same setting. I'd like to keep the strength but decrease the frequency. Willing to bet if I thought on this more I could add a couple of other options to further customize it, like drifter spawning.

The brownish vortices with lightning are rifts and new in 1.16. As for the ghost image in the second image, seems like a weird interaction with one of your mods.

There's a couple of mods (don't know there names) where one allows creating resin nodes with a knife and the other creates a tree tap to gather sap to boil down to resin. I think the former makes the game much too easy while the latter seems in line with the developers intent for the game.

Given the charcoal pit mechanic I expect that suffocating the fire wouldn't work. My experience in combatting unintended fire spread is to break the blocks the fire will spread to.

As realistic as this game is there will always be somethings that won't be realistic for gameplay and fun. If the game were 100% true to life we wouldn't play it. It takes obscene amounts of water to extinguish fires. Homes that are partially consumed by fire suffer flood damage to the parts that weren't consumed by the fire.

I expect you could place a block above the gate, remove the gate and be able to safely kill drifters with a long blade. Nathan Wostrel created a drifter farm that funnels living drifters into a kill chamber using water mechanics then channels the drifter corpses toward a collection chamber. All safely done without threat of damage by drifter.

My only must haves in a new world are reeds/papyrus and knappable stones on day one. Everything else is just a matter in finding it. I like to end day one with a large number of knappable stones and a couple stacks of clay for night time crafting purposes. gotta put those potentially dangerous night time hours to good use.

In the screen shot the y coordinate is pretty much at build height. They're likely to have about a 100+ block fall. Beyond that, one of the more techie folks would need to help.

@NalierI'd say that what makes the game for one person may detract from the fun of another. I'd encourage you to play vanilla for a bit and find out what frustrates you about the game or makes the game un-fun, then look for mods that will address those points of non-enjoyment.