Lagos

Crouching with a shield up and trying to time your attacks to push them back and dodge their strikes. Throw spears if you got them. You're wearing the right armor for handling them but they're simply too brutal to just face tank even with it. Good luck.

Oh I know there aren't explicit biomes. I'm using taiga here as a catchall for the sort of larch heavy boreal forests you encounter in the COOL start, as opposed to the COLD start which I would probably call tundra. I think it's good to have one brutal, barren start option. Right now though cool isn't much different. I think you've weighed in on this before though saying reeds should be present if you look hard enough? And you could get lucky with arctic supplies, but that feels like a stopgap.

I'd like to see the cool biomes ecosystem revisited to make starting in the taiga more viable. Maybe expand the range of cattails and add an alternative source of tannin. Huntable seals would be nice too.

If I interpret the complaint with maximum charity, I think the issue may be the gameplay experience of how they make engaging with the spawns of a temporal storm reckless and dangerous. As you say, you CAN run out to beat them up, but as soon as there are a sufficient number of them spawned all around you, it's very dangerous to do so because you can't engage and eliminate enough of them quick enough to avoid taking a dangerous amount of damage. Drifters don't have quite the same issue because a large group of drifters can still be kited and managed. Once it becomes overly dangerous, it's wiser to just bunker down, maybe build a trap to farm gears. That definitely works but it's probably not as satisfying for someone who wants to engage with the dangerous storm head-on with a balanced degree of risk. I'm not sure I see it as a problem, but I can definitely understand why some folks would find it unsatisfying.