Silent Shadow

They kinda do. Their nests can be harvested for scrap which can be sold to one of the traders. If you kill the deadly sawblade locust you can get gears and scrap. Supposedly the bell locust is similar.

It is not too bad. Generally, if you lack a pick there is no reason to be there but once in the metal age you will spend a lot of time there. Gear list: Have multiple torches or an inextinguishable light source (oil lamp, lantern, candle). Have one torch in the torch slot and keep the rest some where else because if you extinguish your torches in water, you are almost certainly going to die because you cannot see. I cannot understate the importance of light underground. Have some way to ascend, this can be a pick, but ladders are better to have since they are faster and easier to use. Ladders can also be used in open spaces. Dirt/cob is also an option though not as good imo. Ladders or dirt, try to bring a full stack. Have some armor since there are plenty of enemies down there and you are likely to get hit a few times (avoid the situation discussed above until you have better gear). Wood lamellar armor is fairly easy to make (it's so easy, a caveman can do it!) and is a decent starter armor. Replace with metal armor when possible, preferably bronze then iron. Have good weapons, at first this will be a few flint spears you can stab with or chuck in desperation. Later on use metal swords for the attack speed. Optional items include fences which are nice for controlling enemies, horsetail reed medicine since you will get hit and dying sucks, a knife to harvest the enemies you kill and to use temporal gears to restore stability (usually not needed), and a firestarter in case you soaked all your torches accidentally. Whatever you need for the task at hand, usually mining so a pick and propick. From your entrance, descend into the dark and look around. Use torches to mark the way you came in at junctions, or press 'q' to chuck them down holes to see how far they go. Fences are nice to block off dead ends so to manage drifters and so you don't get lost down them. Fences also make good guard rails for the ladders you place going down a ledge so you don't walk off the edge into the abyss (control key is your friend). Keep an eye on your temporal stability as it will be going down when at more than shallow depths, don't wait till the last minute to return to the surface. You will probably fight drifters under ground so be prepared. Fighting is harder since there is less room to maneuver and the ground tends to be more broken, so use fences and out of reach spots to offset this disadvantage. Swords are better than spears underground thanks to their much higher attack speed and the fact that spears will usually run out of room to maintain their range advantage. If you see a huge mob of drifters, you probably should just return to the surface unless you have a few swords and feel lucky. If you see a locust nest, you should probably do the same. If you see a locust with a saw blade on top, turn around and run! That thing can obliterate your health even in bronze armors and can outright kill some unarmored players in one hit. Do not engage with it, it is not worth it. Really though there is not much point to exploring caves unless you want salt, saltpeter, a shortcut to a target ore's depths, or artifacts. Caves are not that interesting in this game and not a great way on their own to get ores. The surface is much more interesting and beautiful, if more boring.

I have never tried, honestly I think just killing them would be less work.

Wolves spawn in the "forest biome" even if you have settled there or have cut all the trees down. If your lakeside plot is considered within the "forest biome" you will get wolves periodically spawn there and there is not much you can do about it.

Chances are that only one mod is breaking the game, so try disabling half of your mods and running the game. If the game crashes, the mod causing the crash is among the enabled mods. Enable the previously disabled mods and disable the enabled mods and run the game again. If the game runs fine, the mod causing the crash is disabled. Enable half of the disabled mods and run the game again. Repeat this until there is only one mod disabled and the game runs fine. That mod is the one causing the crash, so check if it is out of date or check its mod page to see if this is a common problem. Good Luck!

Mud brick works but you will not be able to recover all the bricks when breaking the pile open. A cobblestone "door" can be though.

Uhmm, if you have access to chisels then why are you still using stone tools? When knapping stones in real life you have to hit the stone a lot to break off chips so I think they decided to require each voxel to take a hit to remove it so as to emulate the real life process. Having a click and drag might go against the dev's vision of the game, but I can emphasize with wanting to reduce time crafting (especially with pottery, and that already has the layer copy setting). Also, not to be rude but I believe most people would consider copper/bronze to be mid game and steel late game, with iron in between.

It is best to let heat damaged crops grow to maturity so that you at least get all the seeds back.

I usually find some just by hearing them while I am exploring. I just mark them down on my map and once I find where I want to settle I come back for them. You really don't need to see the hive at all. Just ensure there are plenty of flowers around a free skep surrounded by fences and the wild hive will populate it. Come back after some time and collect the skep for the apiary. Once you find one, you really don't need to find any more. Hives in skeps can populate empty skeps, so just don't destroy them all and you'll bee fine honey.

It depends on what crops you use: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php?title=Farming#Table_of_Available_Crops (see two right most columns). Note that if you have a Green House, crops will be 5 degree hotter than the ambient temperature. So long as the temperature is between 0 degrees or the crop's minimum growing temperature (whichever is highest) and the maximum temperature, the crop will grow. If in that range, I think the growth rate depends only on the plant and the soil conditions (nutrients and moisture). Be aware that temperature will fluctuate throughout the day and so may go out of the desired range, which is probably what happened to your poor turnips as only yielding 50% is indicative of heat/cold damage.

Drifters can spawn on top of walls and roofs so that may be how they are getting in, so light them too or cover them with blocks that cannot be spawned on such as slabs. Honestly it is usually best to skip the night with a bed when you are just starting out. You can do this too with temporal storms, just wait until it says "Temporal Storm Imminent" and then go straight to bed. If you use the bed at the right time, you will not have any drifters spawn above ground and defences will not really matter. Just be aware that you are losing time before winter that you could be using for other vital tasks (I don't consider panning as "vital", but you can). Once you get a little more established then working at night becomes more important, but I would say it is more important that making sure that your home and smithy are considered "enclosed rooms" per https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php?title=Temperature#Enclosed_Rooms so winter doesn't destroy you.

Why do people think berries are too strong? Sure you can live off them until winter but your max hp will be stuck at a low level until you get new food sources. Once you get new food sources for max hp you really don't need excess calories and so berries become obsolete as a main food source. I would like to see brewing in the game though, it is one of the first things we learned to make as a species. Maybe have it restore temporal stability but your character gets progressively more drunk (wavy screen, movement becomes non-linear, attack speed goes down) until blacking out?

Well back in the day they used to "steel" iron tools/weapons by welding an edge of steel onto the tool. Perhaps Vintage Story could emulate this? Maybe have a process to make steel strips from an ingot and then weld them on with a flux? This way most of the tools and weapons could be made of iron but steel would be more worth making since you can stretch it further. The resultant tools could have the speed/damage/tier of steel but the durability of Iron, but if you still want steel armor you would have to make it entirely of steel. If you want this process to be harder, steel and iron weld at different temperatures IRL so you would have to heat each up with narrow ranges before joining them. Failure to meet the temperature requirements may waste the steel and flux. Also, borax could serve as a flux which would increase its worth beyond anvils.

Too many locust.... Good game though.

Nah, we need a blast furnace capable of 100,000 units a day.

I see a flaw. You cannot pour water without a bucket, and you cannot have buckets in this game without metal. Maybe add a clay pot?

Why? You only need to fence the nexus up or bypass it and then the rest of the cave can be left alone if you want the "excitement" of facing the drifters (but only in the few numbers you can handle easily), and again caves are not that pretty, especially after seeing a few of them. I would also say they look more like a mine "naturally" than caves look IRL so there is nothing really to ruin. Then go play Demon's Souls or a rogue like. This game started as a minecraft mod, I doubt the Devs are trying to emulate those types of games and combat is clearly not the focus. Drifter mobs are just another obstacle in the game and one that can be solved with ingenuity and crafting, why take that away? If you like dark souls games, then why not treat this as a challenge? Lighting up the surrounding area while dodging and fighting drifters then slaying them all sounds like a dark souls / rogue like feat to me. I'll be the first to admit that the combat could use some improvements and that some more/better enemies would be appreciated underground, but for now there is not anything better and there is already a territorial monster, the locust. Without some major updates to the combat system, the changes you would suggest would not add anything meaningful to the game but instead reduce the types of encounters and make the valuable underground resources easier to get which would negate a lot of the mid game. I would say that the game just needs a few more methods of dealing damage or control to multiple enemies, preferably in the form of cleaving/aoe attacks or pushing or something to combat hordes. The beenades are interesting, but a little under powered and ore bombs are not effective for fighting, but maybe a grenade could be easily programmed in for a high damage, high resource cost, anti-group weapon? There are already very challenging enemies in the game that hit and take hits like a truck, like the Saw blade locust. It deals 16hp damage (unmitigated) per hit with a long reach, takes hits from bronze weapons like a champ, and cannot be fenced off easily. Easily the most dangerous enemy and it can spawn anywhere underground at anytime. This is also not a fighting game but a crafting game and the mechanics reflect that. Not true. Some quite useful things can only be found in caves like the best food seeds, saltpeter, and artifacts (free money -> free stuff you want from traders). When mining for ores you have to make a choice. To descend deep you can either mine a shaft down and hope you approach the deposit within range of the propick, possibly mining drifts to search more area or you can tame or raid a cave. Mining a shaft down is safer, but slower, and requires more metal to be used for picks, whereas taming a cave consumes renewable resources for the most part with torches, fences, and wood slabs while metal loss from swords and armor is much less since you can roll damaged armor into the next tier (say chain mail into scale mail) for no loss of armor hp or quality. Caves can cover a lot of ground and can quickly descend quite far which is quite efficient for mining out a region surveyed with the propick, and on top of that you can also find artifacts, special seeds, and saltpeter. Again, the game already does all of that (except cold which generally doesn't make sense underground given the heat in the earth. Even cold water would saturate the cave with moisture to make it muggy and thus your character cannot sweat to cool off. At least there is magma). If you lose your meager light sources you are screwed and will probably die, if you don't watch your step you'll probably fall to your death or get trapped in a pit with mobs, you can starve anywhere including underground (especially underground where there is almost no food), you can get lost underground easily with some caves (the sponge like ones or the tunnels galore ones) and the coordinate system will not help you much, players inventories are already limited by slots (not that all the items they would need to explore would require much weight anyway), a weight restriction would not make sense on ladders if you could jump up a whole block anyway and can just build a sturdy ladder, and there are already flooded sections you can swim in. Please no, there is enough tedium in the game already, and I suspect that coding it only for combat would be tricky given how often you are around enemies. Go check out the Game Eco (which is fun, but in a different way) if you want severe block placing limitations (like only being able to move one block of dirt at a time, to mention one.) If you really cannot handle a swarm, or the methods bore you, then just do as Tyron said: At least until the spawning is adjusted or combat updated.

The way the game Eco does it is pretty cool. You chop the tree and it falls down (your character even yells "timber!"). From there you have to cut the branches off and then cut it into segments to put in your inventory.

Keep in mind that you can sell almost broken bronze tools to the traders. I don't think they ever want steel or iron tools.

To my knowledge, it just needs to be built of certain materials to be effective, namely stone or dirt with half blocks and stairs positioned so there are no holes visible.

Fences my friend, they are the key. Isolate the tunnel in sections so no more than a few can spawn inside a section and you don't have to kill the entire tunnel population in one go. Build pit traps to corral those that do spawn so you can just walk past them without fighting. If you separate the caves so they cannot mob up, exploring and exploiting the cave/mine gets a lot safer, and if you cannot deal with the numbers, you can just fall back to your last fence barricade and grind them down from (relative) safety. To quickly kill large groups, dig a 1 wide drift with a 1 block deep, 3 block long hole line and put fences at either drop. Dig a shaft above the hole between the fences and you can drop anvils on large groups to kill tons of them at once. You can even set this up just outside of a large nexus and then dig out the wall to connect to it and entrap them. Using light is a bit inefficient IMO, but you can use oil lamps early on if you want to knock down the spawn rate or to mark the main tunnel path (they never go out and are great for marking the tight turns thanks to their glow.) Later on, you can make brass (and only brass) torch holders to have torches burning forever, or you can make lanterns out of non-brass metals (best use for lead in the form of Molybdochalkos). If you want a safe room you can make it safe with these sources. The key to safely exploring caves is preparation in the form of armor, meds, a decent weapon, some torches, and lots of fences. You can also abuse the spawn mechanic by just leaving and letting enemies reset. Once you get metal, you can make plank fences fairly easily with a saw. Sticks can be generated with shears fairly easily. You can do it safely, but it will take some time to prepare and execute. Good Luck!

I think that once you designate a shape for an ingot, you either got to go through with it or re-smelt it. Kinda annoying, got to measure twice and cut once kind of deal.

Make a chisel, then put it into the inventory gird with the work piece. You should have nuggets of the metal come out as the product as well as the chisel with less health. You can do this with your copper anvil too once you make your bronze or iron anvil.

You can remelt any non-iron workpiece back into an ingot with no material loss (other than the charcoal) and try to make the item you want again. Iron workpieces are similar but go through the bloomery process again.

This 100%. My group doesn't like using exploits either, or running around like crazy kiting drifters like you see some poeople on Youtube do. They don't make exploring the underground feel any better. Also some of them involve turning dirt physics off. Okay, so what kind of danger? The game scales danger fairly well in my opinion as some of the most valuable stuff to acquire (metal ores, artifacts, gears) is in the area that is most dangerous and thus requires the most preparation to successfully exploit. In less dangerous areas there is less to obtain but still good stuff (lot of wood, mushrooms, horsetail, bees, etc. in the woods, but there are wolves). The safest areas like plains have some stuff like crop plants and berries but that's about it. If they do want to remove groups of drifters underground then they should be replaced by different mobs (that people will undoubtedly complain about) to preserve that. Without a big update to the game I don't see a lot more environmental risks for caves that are not already in the game like losing all your light sources in water, falling down a shaft, or cave ins from gravel/dirt near the surface. If they add something like mushrooms that give off a poisonous gas then players will just have to "conquer" it similar to the drifter problem via building infrastructure or tunneling around it. The spawn mechanics could use some work, but there are only a few challenges in fighting. Above ground is generally a joke as there are plenty of ponds you can use to lure mobs into and kill them easily as you move faster than them underwater and have weapons with more reach than them, even wolves are easy to kill this way. Drifters are only a problem if you lack the space to deal with their number. The only real challenges left are mobs of drifters underground, sawblade locusts, and maybe wolves in mountainous areas with heavy foliage at night. They are the reason to invest the time and resources into making good armor and weapons. I don't really understand why people would like exploring caves if not for finding metal ores or limestone/chalk. The glow worm fungus and the stalactites/stalagmites are a good step in making the underground look more interesting, but they are not enough to make caves interesting to explore beyond the first few. Once you have seen a few caves/tunnels, you have more or less seen them all. I see Vintage Story more as a fight against nature and the corruption that killed (mostly) civilization off. I know that there are a lot of people who like making beautiful buildings and using the chisel to make sculptures and engravings, but the core mechanics of the game are about survival and progression of player capabilities (make better stuff which allows you to do better things or do things better). Honestly I read what you two wrote and it seems that you don't really care for the fighting so much as the exploration (and maybe exploitation of the resources within?). If you have light, caves are really not that dangerous except for enemies, so I am not sure how one would "conquer it" otherwise. If that's so, just play on peaceful settings and we should all be happy right?