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After messing around in creative I don't know if that's entirely an accurate thing, really starting to doubt the wiki. I usually build 5x5x3 underground (roof at surface level) cellars and in my survival world I see this difference in spoilage rates, but building an above-ground cellar in creative (same world settings as my survival) with a long covered hallway to the door which allows fine light control, I don't see these rate differences. I opened the hallway at a point where half the room was in pitch black and the spoilage rates are the same. That being said, when I checked the spoilage rates in my survival world it was the height of summer heading into autumn, so temperature was probably a much bigger factor (note that cellars only lower the ambient temperature, they don't set it) and the difference showed up. The creative world is current in spring. It doesn't seem to matter much in the dead of winter. Maybe it's not sunlight (that does seem to be an overall factor just from creative testing, but not a big one) but the differences in temperature across the room?

Without seeing it, I'd guess it's likely due to sunlight exposure. Spoilage rates in my cellar are lower further from the door. The wiki notes that doors do not block light (open or closed) and this has been my experience.

Cellars can definitely be weird. How is the access to these rooms? Are they exposed to natural light? The best cellars I've had were carefully protected from natural light, I'd suggest placing some hay blocks in front of the doors and seeing if they equalize.

My first priority after finding lead is creating a distilling setup, preferably two. My current world seed has tons of pear trees in my area and I've set up an area for six of them, three already vernalized in this first winter. Gonna be a wild summer.

Yeah, we have a mismatch of definitions. "Satisfying" means absolutely nothing to me, it's so personal that it really can't be applied to anything without a lengthy description of what is actually satisfying. For example, I see this in tabletop RPG spaces all the time, where someone asks for a game with "satisfying combat" and then I find out their idea of that is completely anathema to what I enjoy and find satisfying in a game. How the hell can I actually help them find a game without that extra explanation? "Realistic", to me, at least implies something that many people react to as a touchstone and that's probably why you see people use it as a descriptor, despite the inaccuracy (the same goes for TTRPG spaces, when someone asks for a "realistic game" there are many "standard" answers which are generally agreed upon). No argument here, but is that what we're talking about right now or about this definition of "satisfying mechanics"?

I always find the use of the word "satisfying" to be frustrating because it tends to be very personal, while "realistic" tends to be a better descriptor so long as it is tempered by a realistic expectation grounded in an understanding of how a video game works and the genre (if you don't reductio ad absurdum the word "realism" because you're a little bad faith bitch, IOW). Like I don't find the weather cycle to be a satisfying mechanic (it can be hostile to certain activities) but I leave it enabled because it is realistic and provides that part of the experience. Meanwhile, I turn off temporal storms because they serve no purpose beyond being hostile to the vast majority of active gameplay while not being realistic. Decimating a forest for a pit kiln is something I find quite satisfying while cranking out thirty-two 3l jugs one by one because there isn't a 4x recipe for something so basic is extremely tedious and provides no joy in the finished product (also making metal plates manually).

I'm running Better Ruins, Better Traders, Conquest Landform Overhaul, Conquest Blocklayer Overhaul, and No Lore Creatures (I die enough to the wildlife already). Better Ruins and the Conquest mods are awesome, really makes exploration a treat.

Technically there should be no real issue adding rivers to the base game in a better way than simply tunneling through the landscape. They already use a heatmap system for ore, no reason one can't be added for drainage which would interface with world height. Other terrain generation systems have already done this, it's just a matter of understanding and implementing it. The biggest hurdle IMO would be creating water sources that make sense. The default land mass percent might cause issues and would likely have to change, and it would have to take into account older saves, maybe only using that for new worlds, but it's technically feasible. We could even get features like the Colorado River. As far as water wheels, drawbacks have already been pointed out. I'd probably require a bigger outlay in resin since they shouldn't need flax, but that's really it. Might be a little weird requiring natural water source blocks though considering a good water wheel setup will likely require terraforming. Water wheels might also be higher torque but overall lower speed, meaning consistent power that can be geared up for speed (higher material outlay). I'd avoid the issues from mods like Immersive Engineering by only allowing a certain numbers of flowing source blocks to influence power; no weird water cages needed.

This is not the case, the yields remain the same (with 12 day months I should see 33% more yield, not so). tbh I'm thinking of moving the hunger rate to 75% but in my 9 day save I had enormous amounts of surplus by year 2, so I don't really know, still in year 0 of the new save. A big test will be winter, which will be ~9 to 12 days longer and with a "normal" amount of food.

One thing I've noticed is that if you change the month length it also changes the growing time for all plants. This means I spend a whole lot more time foraging for food while starting up agriculture. Meanwhile, decay rates and hunger stay the same. Makes me wonder if adjusting the hunger rate is the answer, especially because I find it fairly absurd as well (although much more reasonable as a game mechanic because it drives action rather than inaction).

Best I can recommend would be a mod that prevents monster spawns and leaving the lore content enabled (on a walk, search for it). It's not ideal; I would personally just like the overland ruins and traders with no other lore content, but preventing monster spawns gets close enough.

I can place these items directly against the roof, they should act like axles in their orientation. Bonus suggestion: The large gear should be able to be placed vertically.

With temporal storms being so hostile to gameplay it's going to take a lot more than just a resource that can be gathered before/after the storm to make me want to turn them back on; that's a ton of wasted time alt-tabbed out of the game waiting for/after resource gathering. Rather than have this hostile game mechanic just hanging around because it "fits the narrative" I think it should be rethought entirely from the ground up, because I genuinely don't see a good way to make the current mechanic interesting in any way.

It's a demonstrable fact. You simply cannot participate in the large majority of the game when a temporal storm happens. It is disengaging gameplay, once you've experienced it once it becomes nothing more than a time sink.

Yes, you'll note I stated that I shut the storms off because they provide nothing interesting to my gameplay. Quite frankly I think they should come with a warning on the configuration screen and/or be off by default for new players for that reason.