Would anyone join a vintage story server? I would probably do it by whitelist, and have a few mods installed.
For the unfamiliar Vintage Story is (to me) a sort of spiritual successor and awesome extension of the idea behind the Minecraft mod Terrafirmacraft
The mods I've been using that I remember are Better Ruins, DR Decor, Ceramos, medieval expansion, maybe a couple others... if I can get it working, I really want to add a sailboat mod.
For worldgen I want to make things interesting and do a hot climate or a cold climate... probably a hot climate. I like the idea of growing pineapples :D
Some gameplay concerns: I have heard that food rotting is a problem on multiplayer because of the passage of time with no players online? Could we set up the server to pause time when nobody's on? We could probably have one collective farm so that whoever's on can take care of it and just put the harvest in a basket for others to take as needed. Really, we could probably pool a lot of stuff and get something like a commune going. I would probably play around an hour a day until September at which point I would try to set aside a couple hours a week :)
Anyways, interested in other's ideas.
It's been a minute but I'm familiar with how to mod the game if you need some simple tweaks like the ideas you mentioned, if they haven't already been addressed. I believe there are some food mods that also extend food preservation even further. For the most part though, food cultivation gets easier as you progress through the game so it's not a huge deal in established settlements., especially if you have plenty of livestock.
I definitely don't have that much time right now, but I have a few hours a week I could spend on the server. Hopefully I'll have more time in a few months.
This is kind of an aside, but I used to be on the mod team of a Minecraft server called Nations at War. We built a huge library of mods that essentially turned Minecraft into a small scale MMO. There was a whole suite of features we built such as a custom chat system, the ability to make parties and nations, repeatable instanced dungeons, custom currency, custom classes and abilities, point systems that tied to how nations could form and expand, and a whole crazy invasion system which was a little bit like a 'king of the hill' scenario. Plots of land could be saved so that after an invasion, territory would revert to what it was before the invasion, and you could claim territory this way.
I've always kind of wanted to revisit the idea by creating a whole new meta-game with Vintage Story. Doesn't have to be warring states, hell, could be something more communist in nature, I dunno. I'm in the middle of another game project that will probably take awhile, but it is something I'm open to discussing and maybe pursuing sometime down the road.