Silent Shadow

Whatever ores are at hand, which is usually tin. Zinc is much rarer than tin on my worlds for some reason.

Pouring metal into wet molds would also cause an explosion, but I doubt that will make it into the game.

Sounds like your issue is with where they spawn, not with them throwing rocks. The best solution I have found is to subdivide your outside areas into smaller zones. You can open gates and doors, but drifters cannot, so they get stuck in one spot and you can just walk by them. For housing and workshops, I have found candles and oil lamps to be sufficient until I can get enough metal for lanterns. If you want large open rooms, then the candelabra is pretty good and somewhat affordable.

The developers watched Princess Mononoke and thought it would be rad to ride an Elk (though Yakul is probably a large deer). More seriously, they probably wanted a mount that could ascend 2 or 3 blocks without people thinking it looks too strange (so your mount isn't limited to small areas due to 2 or 3 block high slopes). Outside of Skyrim, horses are not known for their climbing abilities, but elk manage a bit better. There is also the northern "Sámi" people in the lore that herded reindeer, so maybe they had a breed of elk they rode around.

Even if you ensure all the mashes are dry before removing them they still may not want to stack, and unlike most spoiling items, you cannot combine dry mash and average out their remaining shelf life. Wet mash can be pressed so long as there is at least 16 fruit in it.

There are a bunch of flasks, bottles, and the like already in the game, but they are only decorations found in ruins. There is also lore for alchemy in the game, including the philosopher's stone, so maybe they are planning on adding it.

Spoiler for lore stuff.

Bottling wine to make it last longer would be nice, and it could be an upgrade over clay shaping as molds could be used to speed up the process of making containers like crocks.

A shield or wooden lamellar armor pretty much negates the damage from stones, and the friendly fire incites a lot of brawls. I don't know if they fixed it or not, but it doesn't seem that bad to me.

On a full block (not a slab), right click with the chisel/hammer combo to change the block's status to a "chiseled block," and then you can select linen/wallpaper and right click onto the face you want to cover. Again, only the facets facing the side you applied the linen/wallpaper from will be covered:

The biggest technique I don't see from your screenshots is the use of wallpapers and linen on chiseled items, which you can use to create really nice looking furniture with "upholstery." Basically you can apply wallpaper or linen onto the side of a full block that you have already hit with the chisel (not a slab, though you can cut a full block down to a slab) and each voxel will get the texture applied to their face on that side. You can add and remove voxels and the wallpaper/linen will move accordingly with no loss. This technique looks good but can be expensive, because you need multiple wallpapers/linens per block (the stool below needed 5 linen sheets to cover the top and 4 sides, and the couch needed 13 wallpapers to cover all the sides and armrests.) Fortunately you can break the chiseled blocks and the wallpaper/linen will stay attached, so rearranging your furniture will not require more wallpaper/linen to be applied. The main limitation is that the wallpaper/linen is applied over the entire face of the block, and there doesn't seem to be any way to partially uncover a block (that I know of), so there isn't much point in multi-block chiseling and any uncovered portions must be in another block space to be visible; for example, the couch's wood armrest panels are not in the same block space as the rest of the armrest and the stool's cloth top has to be in the block space above the legs or the wooden legs would also be covered with linen. Unlike the rest of the chiseled block, wallpapers also cannot be rotated, so lining up the designs may depend on the orientation of the work or just may not be possible.

You need the same amount of grass and thatch for a given roofing block, and they both take the same amount of time and tool durability to harvest, so they are pretty much equal as building materials (at least for roofing).

Ideally there would be nearby: water, a forest, a commodities trader, a survival trader, medium/high fertility soil, and a large amount of flat ground to run around in. There should also be easy access into adjacent regions (not boxed in by mountains/ridges), and it shouldn't be super far from your spawn point (if you have respawns on). Reeds and tule are nice to already be there, but you can just collect those and replant them wherever you settle. I am a bit conflicted on rainfall amount. On the one hand, it is nice to have to water crops only once in a while, but it also makes dealing with temporal storms difficult because you'll get cold in winter while running around in the rain/snow and torches cannot be quickly set up. Hail that lasts for days is also pretty annoying.

You can use one big gear to drive three other machines at a 1:1 ratio. Just power a small gear (pinion) and connect it to the big gear's teeth (not its axle) and you can connect three other small gears (pinions) to the big gear's teeth and the torque and speed will be the same for the output pinions as the input pinion. The input pinion will drive the big gear, which drives the three output pinions. You can also connect two loads to the big gear's shaft (one at each end) if you want. Whether the windmill can power three heave hammers at normal speed though will be another question...

Node search is a shortcut that takes the place of exploratory mining. Definitely easy mode, but I cannot blame other players when mining itself is not that great (prospecting however, is fantastic).