Ceridith

You're misunderstanding my issue. I'm saying the only impact surface stability has is a negative impact on my gameplay, which makes the mechanic an annoyance rather than a challenge to be interacted with. It doesn't actually add anything to the overall game other than arbitrarily denote certain areas as places to not linger in. Wandering around in them doesn't even impose that much of a negative impact, just don't set up a base in one and you're fine. I want there to be reasons to interact with low stability areas, some risk vs. reward to engaging with low stability areas rather than simply avoiding engaging in them. Adding more ruins, lootable items that can respawn, but consequently other forms of danger such as higher chance and stronger supernatural entities spawning, to low stability areas would be a step in the right direction. It would actually incentivize venturing into those areas, but also add more risk aside from just making sure your stability doesn't drop too low from hanging around in them for too long. Additionally, being able to impact local stability would be welcome as well. Maybe creating a base in a low stability area in early game is a net negative, but mid to late game using a Jonas device you could negate the negative impacts of low stability in an area. Or maybe you want to drop the stability in an area using a similar device for other reasons. I want the mechanic to be additive to gameplay to be engaged with, not just something that's to be avoided.

My issue with surface stability is that it's simply just not an engaging mechanic. It doesn't add anything interesting aside from an annoyance discouraging where I should build a base, which is particularly irritating if I find an otherwise great spot that world gen arbitrarily decided should have low stability. There's no way to interact with stability other than avoiding staying in areas with low stability for a long while, but at the same time there's no incentive to go into a low stability surface area either. I could see if maybe certain surface ruin areas had low stability but also the benefit of having a higher chance of scavenging something useful, but once everything is looted there's no reason to stick around. Although maybe said temporal stability could be used as a lore reason for scavengable items to respawn in low stability areas. Just something, anything, to justify there being a difference in surface stability and encouraging actually engaging with the mechanic with some risk versus reward rather than it purely being a punishing mechanic that is to be avoided.

I wouldn't say it's rare, depending on geography, but it is finite in the sense that you can deplete it within an area. Firewood on the other hand, you can always plant saplings and get a renewable source of wood going, which you'll probably want to anyways once you start needing charcoal. Personally I prefer to save peat for faster pit kiln firing, or for making quicklime if I don't have charcoal yet, as firewood doesn't burn hot enough to bake crushed lime into quicklime.

I'd count myself in the camp that is discouraged from combat in the default game. It just does not feel worth the hassle to fight the supernatural entities in many cases with how little, or literally nothing, that they drop much of the time. Personally, I find using the Betterloot mod actually strikes a reasonable balance and makes it so I don't feel like I'm wasting time and durability for little to no payoff. And this issue trickles down into other aspects of the game as well, as it makes temporal vortexes and storms more of an inconvenience to be avoided rather than engaged with if there just isn't a reward proportional to the time and risk. Other than that I'm generally fine with combat in the game for what it is. I wouldn't want combat to be overly complex or active, in fact I'd be put off from the game if the combat were more active. I'd mostly like more variety of enemies and ways to engage them with new weapon types, although damage types and different resistances could be an interesting addition as well if done properly. My main gripes are balancing related, such as bow torn spawning too frequently in some cases and their attacks having too much accuracy. Or animals and entities in general not having enough passive sounds to announce their presence and as a result ambushing you from seemingly nowhere because of it. Bears should not be able to silently pass through foliage.

I encountered similar issues with both the elk and sailboat a few days ago, where if the game crashes while you're riding on either they get stuck in some limbo state when you load back into the world. I dug through the audit logs to find the entity IDs and poked around with some of the debug commands to try to find them after this happens. From what I found the entities still exist in the world and seem to follow your character around if you search the location of the entity as if you're still riding them, but they're completely invisible and cannot be interacted with in any way. I haven't been able to find any way to pull them out of this state once this happens, so they're just kind of lost to the void.