Chrondeath

Pies, because I'm making pies anyway to optimize the satiety from and lifespan of berries. First winter I've always got a giant pile of berries going into it that will expire long before winter is over, and a significantly smaller pile of grain, so the main order of business is figuring out how to maximize what I get from berries. Juicing reduces their sat instead of increasing it and takes up barrels to store, honey's too hard to come by in quantity and takes up crocks to store, porridge doesn't have as good of a berry-per-grain ratio as pies. Since I'm making pies anyway, there's not much need for something else to cover the grain nutrition. Now, second year when the fruit trees are producing and I have boatloads of grain and a full container of pears or something that have significant duration by themselves....yeah, then bread might be the plan for the excess grain, though the fruit pies are still on my mind.

I think it depends entirely on how much you already dug out the area. If you dug one shaft, hit a cassiterite vein halfway to mantle, dug it out, and that's all you've been using? Sure, there's almost certainly more veins around there, because if there was only one vein in the area then it's improbable that you found it with so little effort. If you soda-crackered all over (dug multiple shafts in a pattern like the holes in a saltine) and they all went to bedrock without finding anything and then you finally found one cassiterite vein after a dozen shafts, then yeah--I would still guess there's probably more veins in the area but the expected effort to find them would be even higher because you're getting further from the peak.

I have never been convinced that the hunger pause is actually tied to the cookpot. This explanation is more plausible to me (roughly: the hunger pause is proportional to the highest nutrition value in the last bite you ate, but most things you would eat before getting a cookpot aren't high enough to really notice it). Pies certainly do pause hunger, I've watched the hunger value drop at a roughly consistent rate in the character pane and then stop dropping after eating a slice of pie, at least in the immediate term. If the linked theory is correct, a red meat pie slice should have the same hunger pause as a 2x red meat + 2x vegetable stew, which is something I vaguely want to test sometime but I'm not sure if I could measure accurately enough. The relevance to spices is that spices can't apply the "special cookpot effect" to other things, because there is no special cookpot effect. Applying a multiplier to the hidden-hunger-pause-nutrition might be plausible but without making it un-hidden it would be hard to explain what benefit the spices were having, though?

Oh, that sounds like an entertaining kind of bug, code-wise.

Well, that sounds like an extra nightmare to add on top of searching for thousands of blocks for limestone and bauxite to make leather and steel.... I do really like Valheim's cart mechanics, but over the distances that are needed for different stone types and with the mountains and hills that generate currently, it seems implausible. Maybe if the 1.21 "more easily traversable" thing works out.

I really liked how Valheim's smoke mechanics required me to incorporate some kind of chimney or smoke solution into my builds. If there's no mechanical reason for me to build something like a chimney, I end up either not building it or feeling a little disappointed that there was no purpose if I do. I feel like cellars are a similar existing nudge. If food preservation and cellars hadn't been a mechanic, I probably would have ended up with all my food stored in a pile of chests in my main room, as usually happen in my minecraft bases. I have a semi-related desire to see fire safety apply to more things than pit kilns; I kind of wish that the standard campfire required a little preparation (maybe an opportunity for the tutorial to teach new players about packed dirt and rammed earth), leading to a mechanical need for fireplaces (though preferably paired with it being easier to recover from screwing up a fire--maybe limited spread, or converting blocks to "scorched" variants instead of destroying things).