KoviBat

Wanted to follow up on my previous assumptions, while you could build a beehive kiln out of fire clay, you also need the kiln door, which requires four nails and straps, and two iron bars, which gates it firmly behind the Iron Age, when this really is something you should be able to make around the late Copper/early Bronze ages. Really, the amount of resources required to put one of these together is ridiculous. You need 250 bricks of your choice of tier (12 for the door, 18 for the gratings and 220 for the brick blocks), and at least 17 ingots of iron (1 for nails and strips, 4 for the bars for the kiln door, and 12 for the iron hatch doors). Unless you want to double the amount of fire clay required, you'll also need two ingots for iron pounder caps for your pulverizer in order to make higher tier bricks. You'll also need a full windmill to power that pulverizer reliably, which is 256 Flax fiber. You can get it to work on a particularly windy day with half that number, but 128 flax fiber is still difficult to come by without getting good luck with cracked vessels. All this just to not use up a little grass, a few sticks, and some firewood is absolutely not worth the amount of effort that goes into it. Especially since the bricks can, and will, break. I think the Beehive Kiln needs to be reworked to only use fire clay bricks, and not need iron to make it. You can easily replace the iron bars with solid stone, like that used in the Quern and Coffin recipes, and the iron nails and strips with mortar. Then, reduce the heat damage drastically, and only let firewood be usable as a fuel. This makes it accessible for the mid-game, which is where it will be most useful. That's when you'll want to fire a bunch of molds for things like hammers, anvils, helve hammers, prospecting picks, and general tools and armor. Iron is still far off, even if you're in the early bronze age, but you can reliably make any ceramics you need without needing to aerate your lawn.

We already have Graphite in the game, no known use at this time, though.

I do think there's a lot of room for improvement for animal behavior. Something like an A-Life system would probably be the best (but most resource-intensive) solution. Animals don't just spawn in the open, they could have dens and warrens and caves that they live in, where they go to sleep. Then, depending on if they're nocturnal or diurnal animals, go out from during the day. They could have different food types that they specifically look for, be they plants or other animals. During winter they're less likely to come out of their dens, as they're hibernating, though some species are better suited for winter weather than others. I also think there should be a little more variety in animal behavior when it comes to violence. Big cats are ambush predators that prefer not to attack head-on. If you make eye contact with them, they largely remain still until you turn your back. They likely behave the same with their prey. Wolves mainly chase whatever runs from them on initial eyesight and won't attack things that stand their ground. Bears can stay how they are. Having a system where the way you behave can affect how some potential predator animals interact with you would be a step forward, I think. Maybe even be able to get close if you're crouching with food in hand. I'm not for wolf-taming, but I like the idea of wolf de-escalating.

We have soybeans, so soybean oil could be a pretty easy option as well. It'd be nice to have an alternative to animal fat for some recipes. It'd also be nice if cooking using oils or fats did something to improve cooking in some way. Maybe cooking speed? Or maybe a slight satiety boost?

I do think farming could use a slight upgrade in the kinesthetic department. The active way that we do smithing and chiseling is (in my opinion) the strongest point of the game, and ideally, most mechanics would have that level of detail and interaction. A more anchored animation for tilling and planting might help. I don't think we need to pick the voxels to plant the seeds in, but having something a bit more interesting than right-click-cadabra would go a long way towards making it more interesting. Also having some visual indicators to plant deficiencies would help. Right now, you have to get your cursor on it to find out if a plant is deprived of a nutrient, suffering heat damage, or lacks a sufficient amount of moisture. Being able to visually see indicators of those without the crosshair info widget would go a long way to driving player interaction, without adding any additional complexity that might be bothersome to a casual player. (Also, scythes should increase seed drop chance). I'd like farming to be more interesting, but I think it already is, it's just more difficult to engage with due to a lack of easily interpretable information.

I think you can make a beehive kiln out of just fire clay bricks, and there do appear to be Kiln doors now, rather than the iron door required for steelmaking, but the handbook really doesn't communicate very well what happens if you use fire clay bricks instead of refractory bricks, or different tiers of bricks aside from just saying "heat damage." In fact, I find this is an area where the handbook is very lacking in information. Do different types of fuel affect how much "heat damage" bricks take? So if you wanted to make a low-tier kiln for firing basic pottery, could you just fill the fuel floor with firewood and not cause any heat damage to fire clay bricks? I would hope so. Then to make it into a coke oven or a blister steel kiln you would need to use higher tier bricks because of the higher temperatures. That's how I'd set it up ideally, but there's nothing to indicate that's how it works.

Because of how the smithing works, you wouldn't actually be able to make a hollow tube, because the voxels just drop to the lowest point of the grid they occupy. The only way to do it would be to put something else, maybe a ceramic 1x1x6 voxel rod in that spot while you're smithing before moving the rest of the metal on the top. Could be a multi-step thing like clay forming. Step 1 is clear the spot for the rod. Step 2 is shown once that spot is clear, and you just right-click with the rod. Then it shows the final step, where you just move the rest of the metal on top of it. It would be a bit sophisticated, but by no means frustrating, so long as the instructions on how to make it are clear. Maybe even make it a requirement to have the ceramic rod before you can even select the tube.

Also opens the option for cold drinks to be added to lower body temperature in hot climates. Fruit juices or maybe iced tea.

Even if it's just cosmetic, having something that looks a step up from a pile of sticks on the ground is something I want. A simple stove for indoor cooking, and maybe something to heat the crucible as well. For a moment I considered the Forge as an option, but that would add some problems with its current UI/UX because right-clicking removes items from the Forge instead of opening up a cooking menu to let you put stuff in the crucible. Maybe a small iron grate like the bronze-age grill you proposed could be set on top of the Forge?