Philtre

if you hit the "H" key, it pulls up the handbook, which lets you look at and search all the items in the game and their recipes. (It also has some short guides to basic mechanics.) If you planted some crops but they are now grey and dead, they may have been eaten by rabbits. Look at the dead plant, and the "block info" text should explain why it died. You can surround your garden with a fence to keep animals out; the "rough-hewn fence" and "rough-hewn gate" just need sticks and logs, they don't need a saw.

Most of the time, this would mainly helpful if you have remapped the controls, because the default controls for most interactions are displayed when you look at the relevant object, so long as you have block info view on (personally I recommend keeping it on at all times).

"Game mode configuration settings very confusing if you've never played before but some settings that increase the difficulty/cut out aspects of the game (such as prospecting pick and exclusive recipes) it's debatable whether they should be turned off by default as I see that being confusing." The node search mode for the prospecting pick is off by default, because the devs don't really like it; it was added because a lot of people wanted it, but the devs really intend you to use the density search mode and the geography (depth, rock type, etc.). "how many copper nuggets do I need? How many in an ingot/tool/anvil?" The handbook guide on smelting explains that "most molds require 100 units of metal to be complete", and the guide on smithing states that an anvil mold requires 900 units of metal. You can also see the metal capacity on a specific mold just by looking at it, as long as you have block info view enabled. (You do have to convert from units of metal to nuggets, but "divide by 5" is not very difficult math.)

Not as far as I know. It should only affect whether you can sleep on demand. However, drifters shouldn't spawn while you are asleep, so if you go to sleep before the storm actually starts and sleep all the way through it, you should get no storm-related spawns.

The game doesn't seem to want you to be able to hole up and hide during temporal storms. By default, you can't sleep during storms, and if you try, the game tells you you can't because "you might die". During the most severe storms, almost all spawning rules are relaxed, such that drifters can even spawn in midair, possibly even when clipping into the player. So asking for a no-spawn zone around the player as a default game mechanic seems unlikely to fly. If it really bugs you, you can turn off storms, or use a mod that enforces stricter spawning rules.

It really depends on what kind of food you have available, how cold it gets in your area / how long winter lasts, and how well you can avoid the hunger penalties for being cold (which are substantial). If you are in the standard temperate starting climate, staying warm will help reduce the amount of food you need. So try to get the fur coat and boots, and try to repair your shirt and pants with pieces of linen right before winter starts. Make sure your house is cold-proof (interior space of each room not over 7x7x7 blocks, insulating blocks like solid blocks or glass used for walls and roofs, no crude doors, etc.): when indoors, even in very cold weather, your hunger rate should be the normal 100% (assuming no class penalties and not doing anything that causes a hunger penalty, like holding an item in your off-hand or healing from damage). You can see the hunger rate in your character menu ("c" hotkey by default).

Raccoons will eat berries, I don't think anything else will. So if your area doesn't have raccoons your berries will be OK, otherwise you probably want a fence. When you harvest a plant growing on farmland, there's a small (5%?) chance of getting an extra seed. So you will very slowly get more over time. But the main source of seed is finding wild crops. To get tree seeds, you need to break the leaves (your hand is fine, but shears speed up the process if you have them) before chopping the tree. You will get few or no seeds if you let the leaves despawn when the tree is chopped.

So in 1.17-rc3, empty crocks now have a label with a greyish image of some kind (I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to be; it kind of looks like a squashed berry?). Previously, empty crocks had a plain white label. I found the new label disconcerting, because the grey palette somewhat resembles the texture of rotten food, and when I first saw them in my ongoing world I thought that the game was telling me that a couple of shelves' worth of crocks had spoiled. Personally, I liked the old plain labels; they were easy to tell apart from full crocks and conveyed the "empty" concept nicely. I realize this is a ridiculously minor issue, but after spending a lot of time in my cellar messing with the new dye system (because the cellar is where the well and all the barrels are), every time I pass the empty crock storage shelves they just bug me more and more..... Does anyone else prefer the old labels too?

Make sure you aren't including the brackets around the word true. The command should look like this: /worldconfig temporalStability true

I loaded up a creative game and overall I like the changes. (The falx is weird, though.... I would kind of like the longblade as am option too.) However, when I updated an old word to this version, water was being weird in a couple of ways. Most notably, I couldn't pick up water with a bucket or bowl (other liquids worked fine). In addition, Cooper's reeds displace water, and breaking blocks of lake ice did not remove the ice; instead it appears to create a waterlogged block of ice. These issues did not appear in a freshly-created world, so it appears to be something with updating old-style water?

Trench around garden = trapped rabbits = free meat and small hides....

As of a recent update (I forget which one), cutting grass with a scythe will send it back to the shortest growth stage, allowing it to regrow. Thus, you can now maintain a permanent field of grass and harvest it whenever it is fully grown. Cutting grass with a knife will still remove the plant entirely, as always.

In general I agree that wolves shouldn't be so aggressive; they should defend themselves, and they should try to keep you away from their cubs, and maybe their "den" area (although I'm not sure they have any such thing in the game currently), but they shouldn't randomly attack when you are nowhere near them. Also I think that enemies in general could stand a clearer and more consistent use of aggro and pursuit notification sounds; it's hard to tell whether something is actively chasing you if you can't see it. However, there are some steps you can make to make wolves less lethal. Make the most basic wood armor (I forget what it's called, but it's just firewood and dry grass); it will let you take a couple of extra hits. Once you have a farm up, grow as much linen as you can; the gambeson is pretty decent armor (and you will also need linen for a lot of other stuff too). If a wolf (or any animal) starts chasing you, try to lead them into water; they have a bigger speed debuff in water than the player so it's easier to keep distance. Have a bunch of spears and throw them rather than engaging at melee range, or use a bow and arrow. (If you have good block-placing reflexes, you can pillar up instead of going to water.) If you are OK with mods, there is one that takes players off the wolves' "hunt when hungry" list, which makes them a bit more reasonable.

Materials play a part in the definition of a "cave". You can try to replace some blocks with ceramic-type blocks (such as hardened clay, clay shingle, or clay brick) or with lightly-chiseled stone/cobblestone blocks - both of those are acceptable for cellars but will prevent it from being a cave. Note that if stuff is spawning in your cellar and it's not a temporal storm, it is probably not sufficiently well-lit.

I was hoping this would mean that you would no longer need an insulating layer of blocks under the roof to prevent the hunger penalty in winter, but apparently not. I'm not sure what this change affects, maybe attaching lanterns or something?