zand

Greetings Professor Dragon,
I did a lot of testing with the beehive kiln and burning piles a while back, and I don't believe that rain would stop it from working. For a beehive kiln to start heating the items inside, you need the 9 stacks of fuel to be burning at the same time. If one of the stacks doesn't ignite or runs out of fuel, then the items will stop heating. Once the items heat up to a temp (950°C), they should start progressing to their baked versions. If the temp drops below 950°C before it is done baking, it stops progressing but keeps its current progress. Starting at 0°C, the entire process takes about 10.9 in-game hours.
To start off, you would have to consider possible user errors, like the beehive kiln not being complete or one of the stacks of fuel not having enough items, which for peat I think is 22 in each stack. I think the latter is likely the reason because, due to fire spread being random, I had cases where about 3 of the items burnt in the first stack I lit before the other 8 started burning. Because of this, I would recommend 26 pieces of fuel per stack. Both peat and logs have the same burn time when in a pile.
The other possibility is that it didn't finish due to a bug.

Greetings,
The prospecting pick had 2 modes: density search and node search.
You start with density search, which samples the heatmaps that the world gen uses to determine whether to spawn each type of ore at that X and Z coordinate. The readings are in ‰, which is per 1000, not 100 as it is with %. So a reading of 1‰ means that on average, the game will try to spawn 1 block of ore for every 1000 blocks in that area.
Once you find an area with a high density, you should switch to node search and start digging vertical shafts. Node search scans all the surrounding blocks within a short range and tells you about how much of each ore it found. What I normally do is dig a vertical shaft and sample every 8th block as I go down. Once you do get a reading in node search, it means that the ore is just a few blocks away.
Other notes are that high density does not mean that there is ore, just that there is a chance of ore. Even if you mine all the ore out of an area, the density reading will remain the same.

Greetings Janeator,
I am afraid that I don't have good news as it sounds like your clientsettings.json was corrupted when you lost power. I tested out corrupting mine and the game seems to only load the backup when the original is missing. In the event that the file is corrupt, it overwrites both the main file and backup with the default settings.
I have reported this as a bug as I believe that it was intended that the game use the backup when it's unable to load the main settings file.
https://github.com/anegostudios/VintageStory-Issues/issues/6264
The one positive note is that VintageStory does use a SQLite database for its save file format, which is designed to be resistant to corruption from power loss or crashes.