Unsp0ken

I think you bring up a lot of great points here. For the first 10 days of a playthrough, I survived in a 3x3 dirt shack, and I had no real reason to get rid of it; the only reason I did was vanity. I am also disappointed that there is no real reason to fortify your base. I'd love to see spawning mechanisms changed; if a drifter can't get in a space, they shouldn't be able to spawn in it, and even then, fortifying your base has no point except looking cool, maybe something along the lines of hordes that are configurable in the settings, I feel like temporal storms are just too easy, just hide in a building and wait, hordes could know your location and try to break down doors or something.

If you're looking for more piles, a great mod is More Piles (https://mods.vintagestory.at/morepiles), which adds piles for bones and other things, which help greatly with early game storage. This mod doesn't add your idea of huge piles, but placing 4 piles next to each other creates a similar effect.

Bulk production of dough would be a great addition, I do like your idea of using a barrel, I had tried something similar by throwing it in water (Which makes the flour disappear over a few minutes), right now I'd recommend making dough near a water source so you can fill your bucket up easily

I think having the ability to have a beehive kiln-like structure, but for our breads and pies, could be quite useful for players (Like me) who have acquired lots of flour and bread dough. Baking 4 bread and only 1 pie at a time is time-consuming, and although making more ovens works, it consumes lots of fire clay and firewood. Having a larger, stone-based option could greatly decrease the time spent on baking. It wouldn't even have to be huge to greatly improve baking, something like a 2x2 oven space used for baking up to 16 bread and 4 pie would be a major improvement, and I'd love to see this get added to the game.

I did end up replacing those oil lamps, and that mostly fixed the issue, maybe due to oil lamps not doing a great job of lighting up the floor and just having a real poor light level leading to mob spawns. Lanterns are still not perfect, but so much better, thanks! Also sucks oil lanterns don't work well, love their lighting.

Yup, as the title suggests, having lots of issues with drifter, bowtorn, and shiverer spawns, sometimes I'll come home, and they'll be up to 5 of these dudes inside my house, sometimes it's just due to rifts, which I mean, fine they have a reason to spawn, but it is annoying. Although, sometimes, they spawn in my home without rifts nearby, super annoying coming home and trying to put things in my cellar only to be met with a party of drifters, I'm playing on 1.20.9, temporal activity is enabled, everything is well lit, a mix of oil lamps, lanterns, and torches, is this just a me problem?