This is a post to brainstorm some ideas about the game and what it could have been. I'll start by listing some old features that I really liked:
As I mentioned in my previous post, isometric screenshots. They just look good.
The old smelting system. It was only in indev version 0.31. You would smelt iron by using flint and steel to ignite a fire in which you would then drop the iron ore onto the fire, producing iron ingots. It was definitely faster and more "atmospheric" than the current way of smelting in my opinioni even though it was simpler.
The saturation of Alpha and below, it makes the simplest places look nice.
I switched back to Java version specifically because of that. If I can't safely walk away from the game by pushing a single button, I can't play it. Real life comes first.