Maelstrom

Bones can be used for stone knife and axe handles which provide a bit of durability boost. Poisonous mushrooms (particularly death caps) are a dual purpose item: instantly heals all damage AND teleport to spawn. =D Kidding aside, you are right about poisonous mushrooms. Although they are fun to troll your server-mates with if hidden in cooked meals. PS - Welcome to Vintage Story!

kiln burn times are (to my knowledge) based on the fuel not the object being fired.

Additionally, drifters have a difficult time attacking downward through half blocks. So you can set up a kill pit where drifters are collected, the floor composed of vertical slabs with a space underneath for you to attack them through. To my understanding it is safe from drifter attack.

Was chased up a ladder by an angry ram that I was trying to corral so he wouldn't die to the local fauna. I had a two high fence opposite the gate we ran through, jumped on the ladder to scramble over the fence to close the gate and was shocked when the ram helped me over the top of the fence to give me a piece of his mind about the rock I had pitched at him a couple kliks back.

Tyron has mentioned that rivers are difficult. It may be quite a while before we see that feature implmented.

Or skipping stones on a lake. My favorite is playing a tuning cylinder near a rift.

Tyron has a pretty liberal return policy. Considering that the home page records over 1,000 copies sold each month seems like the team is doing well enough. There's also this from the home page:

I haven't played the new version yet, but from my understanding of the new terrain gen mechanics, it seems that reducing the uplift may create greater likelihood of flat terrain.

This SO needed to be done! Thank you Tyron!

You could install the carryon mod that allows you to sling that basket on your back and take it with you.

Assuming no significant changes from 1.17.x - it can take an in game day or two for a wild bee hive to register nearby flowers and begin growing for swarming. There are tool tip displays for wild hives indicating how long before an anticipated swarm.

It's likely a bug. The cold temp should allow it to be removed from the mold.

Weeeellll... The developers consist of 1 full time coder (Tyron) and at best a couple additional coders that volunteer. There's other full time people on the dev team that handle art and story development, but for putting those ideas into code? Just the one. I'd say the game we have plus (on average) two major updates a year is pretty freaking good for such a small development team.

For the former - I just run overland away from home. As long as you have a bit of food on you there's no problem, just keep running. I've been caught a long way from home while heading home when a storm hits. Since I play blackguard I don't have the hunter's speed bonus and only get hit by a rock once or twice. If you don't have anything, just run away from home and circle back when storm starts winding down. The storm I described? It hit pretty quickly, I think May 6 or 9 on a 12 day month cycle. I was knapping spear heads for the first half of the storm atop a single block tower of hay and no drifters spawned next to me; although I saw drifters spawning below me. After I finished knapping my arsenal I took down my nerd pole and ran around attacking drifters the second half (sans armor). Mind you, I'm not good with combat. I built up some space between me and the drifters, turned and tossed two or three spears, ran away some more and repeated the process. When I ran out of spears, circled around to pick up the ones I had thrown and started the process over.

No worries. We'll just mock you and bring it up endlessly. Just kidding. Don't worry about it. The intent of the devs is to do away with grid crafting completely. What that looks like regarding making planks is speculative but you give a good idea. If you have the desire you could create a mod to do what you suggest. (YAY! smileys are fixed!)

I LOVE that Tyron makes the game so customizable and always advocate for customizing the game for fun. Here's how I handle early game storms (but do what is fun for you!) Turtling isn't necessary to enjoy storms early game. I, too, was recently caught under-equipped for the first storm of the world. I pillared up about 20 blocks and spent some time knapping 8 spear heads and then descended for the fight. Almost bagged me a double headed drifter. I would have if I hadn't been dumb going after a spear that was too close to him. If you have a base just run around the perimeter and pick off drifters with spears. When they get close to you run away some more, turn and plug some more drifters. Run out of spears? Just run keep running the perimeter until you get back to where the spear are.

Run overland is an option. Fight the pesky monsters (throwing spears and kiting can be effective) or create a panic room using Streetwind's requirements to prevent monster spawns are the other two options. Sleeping may work if you have that option enabled.

I love me some trilobites!

hot pools are a terrain generated feature. Gotta go on an explore in new chunks for them to generate.

Weeeellll... Since bears were introduced in 1.17 downgrading to 1.8 would definitely de-rez your buddy Barry Bear. But I assume you meant updated to 1.18 and agree that your captive wild animals in the zoo are likely to despawn. But others will be able to confirm better than I.

Make a back up of your 1.17 world and then try it. If the world breaks, you can revert to the back up and continue playing in 1.17 (probably need a separate install to do so though).

If you are using the VSProspectorInfo mod, default setting requires you to hold the propick to see the chunks you've prospected in and the results for that chunk.

A cook pot of red meat stew holds 6 meals. add a bowl of same and you have a 7th meal. Eat before you depart and you have 7 high satiety meals on the run. Plus a cook pot to refill while out and about.

Try here: https://www.vintagestory.at/forums/forum/27-mods-mod-development/ as a better forum for your post.

Nope. There is only the one terrain generator in 1.18. What you can do is tweak the parameters. I would expect you can tweak those parameters to get a similar result to pre1.18 generation.