Maelstrom

That isn't a bug. If anything a logic error to prevent such stuff from happening. Both things spawned appropriately, so not a bug. They just happened to spawn undesirably close to each other.

If water is in all food, what's the point of making water separate? With your suggestion I fail to see how it improves the game. To me it would add more tedium to make sure I'm drinking water to get what is already in the game.

That's my assumption since individual trees despawn leaves properly.

Kinda like it is already?

Adding water as another nutrition would monkey with the hit points, potentially unbalancing them. There would be lower hp when you need them at the start of the game and high hp later in the game when you're less likely to need them as much (due to armor, healing items, etc). Personally, I consider water to be part of the existing satiety mechanics.

And decked out in all the finest winter furs without threat of sun stroke, heat exhaustion, dehydration.

I'm with you @Thorfinn. While I still have a couple (maybe a few) decades left in me, at the rate this game is improving I too will be pushing up daisies. I don't mind as the rate of releases and how much is released is delightful! It gives me a chance to get accustomed to and enjoy the new features before more features come out. The only frustrating part is the persistence of leaves after cutting down a tree farm where the tree canopy ends up getting connected to each other. Hopefully Tyron fixes that in 1.20 bug squashing phase.

I think how they work currently IS the lore they present. Their recurrence and other similarities to normal weather indicate this world is damaged. Something dreadful happened in the past and we have to piece it together given the in game lore. Granted the storms become pretty monotonous, fairly quickly for most. I find it fun to find a big open field and run around bashing the baddies just for the sake of bashing baddies.

So, we're talking about this?

It's not hard once you have enough wax, copper plates and clear quartz chunks. Lanterns only need to be spaced about 25 block apart or so and that covers a LOT of real estate. I typically don't need more than 10 lanterns.

They spawn within about 15 blocks of a rift. Rifts do not spawn in areas with a high enough artificial light level (meaning light NOT generated by the sun). Torches are good for about 3 block radius while lanterns are good for about a 12-15 block radius. There's a mod that will indicate where a drifter may spawn. I don't recall the name though.

Rivers seems to be tied to flowing water mechanics to power water wheels. This has to major difficulties - generation and water mechanics. Based on the difficulties there were in getting oceans introduced (finally in 1.18) I expect that rivers are exponentially harder to implement for what he apparently has in mind.

Sounds kinda like real life. After the first hail storm or three, they're just annoying to wait out so that outside activities can be resumed. If you don't like temporal storms after the first few, you can enable sleeping through temporal storms in the game settings. There should be a command to enable that if the world has already been started.

Additionally, warm and hot climates do not require fashioning additional clothing for winter which can be a serious obstacle for getting to those wonderful leather backpacks.

One last option is a game command to reset spawn point. I do not know what it is off the top of my head coz I actually like the in game system.

As are we all!

I think I had 4 "test" worlds I played in to understand the mechanics enough to play my first "real" attempt. The first world ended during the first pitch black night without a light source. lesson learned - 2 sticks, 2 flint and 2 grass are the most important day one objected (make a torch!) World 2 ended during late spring having learned the initial basics but painted myself in a food production corner. World 3 ended after I had a firm grip on getting to the late copper age without threat of starvation World 4 ended after I had mastered use of the prospecting pick. Worlds 5-7 were spent refining the world settings and mods I find pleasing and satisfying to play in. I'm now playing in world 8 that was started because world seven was pre-1.18.

Why temporal storms? Coz the devs wanted to bring you on their acid trip. Snarky comments aside, there's nothing else I have to contribute that hasn't already been said.

It is strongly suggested to not limit the size of the map as you've indicated. Such a small size may lead to some critical resources (probably more than one) not generating within the confines of the world. As for the other questions, I don't have experience or knowledge to help.

Not all plate helmets have visors. Consider today's combat helmet is the equivalent head protection as a medieval knight's helmet, sans visor. There were also metal helmets sans visor prior to the visored helmet you are describing. The only thing the visor does is protect the face, which in hand to hand combat is not likely to happen.

I have yet to see Esc not pause the game in over 2 years of playing. I think everyone saying otherwise is plain looney tunes! But, I've never left the game on pause for more than about 10 minutes. If I know I will be gone that long I just quit to desktop.

I watched a Utoob video a few months ago (produced within the past year) in which the producer of the video referenced an interview with Tyron that revealed Tyron believes the game was (at the time) about 10% complete. I think it is safe to say that this game will never be considered complete given that the first 10% has taken almost 8 years.

Unless the gear is at 100% in a positive stable area, it'll pretty much stay still as well.

All that needs to be done is balance how much grain is created. Force the player to determine how much needs to be retained for planting vs. grinding into meal. The hard part is balancing how much to grind into food before there's a large enough pool of grain to sustain the competing objectives. What would make it even more realistic is if yield was more variable, say 100% +/- 25%

Temporally unstable areas can be quite large. In my current world I have a copper mine in the middle of huge area that is about 250 block radius and the min is just about dead center. By the time I've mined one deposit I'm almost down to 25% stability, climb the ladder and run to a stable area. I've seen that unstable areas are usually about 200 - 250 block diameter. As @Thorfinn asked - how much of the world have you explored? If it's more than a 500 block radius, are your sure the entirety of it is unstable? Meaning you may have checked for stability in an unstable area, run through a stable area (without checking stability) and run into a second unstable area when you checked stability again.