Byrnorthil

I played in my 1.21 world for something like 40 hours seeing only the occasional goat near my spawn (blue clay valley between some mountains). I never saw any animals spawn right near my base and had to travel a significant distance to get my chickens. I migrate to 1.22, walk home, and there are no less than five sows and two rams with a lamb each, and one of the sows spawned inside my animal pen I'd made for my one goat kid. Is this something that can just happen, or is it an oddity related to the migration?

When differently spoiled items stack the game takes the average (this is also what Don't Starve does), which isn't realistic at all but as far as I can see it's a necessary compromise to make stacking work. I do however think that the way the game currently implements the logic of deciding whether or not it will stack is unhelpful and unintuitive and I've posted a change request here if you'd like to give it some publicity.

The wiki refers to fat as "one of the most common drops" and as mentioned the in-game progression guide also refers to it as "cheap"... Did it used to be more common? It just feels like everything is expecting fat to be 2 or 3 times as abundant as it has been for me.

I've just made a windmill, autohammer, & pulverizer (in hindsight that one was a mistake and I could've just made a quern instead...), and I'm realizing that this all takes a ton of fat which I don't have. I didn't bother doing much hunting or any domestication during the early game because I could feed myself just fine on crops & berries, and the in-game progression guide refers to oil lamps and lamellar armor as "cheap" and "early-game", so the 5 or so fat I did acquire went into those. And now I'm regretting having made them... Which was my mistake: crafting that gear, or being a vegetarian? If I'd bothered to fence in some hogs a few hours in would I be fine?

When picking berries on a long mining trip, I noticed that I wasn't getting any more berries from picking. Each of my inventory slots was taken but i had partial slots filled with the currants I was trying to pick, so I honestly thought it was a bug and resigned myself to tossing an item to leave a slot open. I was surprised when the new berries ended up in the open slot rather than stacking with my existing berries, and so I discovered the game's tendency to avoid stacking items with different enough spoilage levels. I actually like this mechanic quite a bit, but it has proved to be very annoying multiple times and so I propose a solution: add an option for it! A few, actually. I'd like to see three (maybe four) different behaviors available to choose from: 1. Always keep separate: Exactly what we have now, could be nice to enable in situations where you know you're about to consume items which are about to spoil. 2. Always stack: Pretty self-explanatory, would simply disable the mechanic and always prioritize compactness. 3a. Stack when inventory full (new default): Keep separate, unless no slot is available, in which case the new item would be stacked. 3b. BONUS OPTION: Aggressively stack when inventory full: Same as above, except the check is run whenever any item tries to be added, and existing stacks in the inventory can be merged to make room. Example: you have two stacks of five currants in inventory, and game tries to add a stick to inventory and fails. Game notices that item addition was blocked, merges the currants into a single stack of ten, and adds the stick to the newly opened slot. Would be significantly more difficult to implement and isn't necessary at all but I thought I'd throw the suggestion in.