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.

I'm not sure I have the time to be a dedicated mod right now, but I would absolutely check out the server!

The Alt-Right Playbook: You Can't Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs

I'm not sure I would call Nolan an outright conservative, but there is a lot of state apologia and counter-revolutionary themes in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. There's multiple examples including the justification of surveillance for anti-terrorism purposes, stateless anarchy portrayed as monstrous via Bane and The Joker, Alfred justifying imperialist actions in Burma, the protagonist being a rich billionaire, a lot of dialogue that seems to suggest it's not the system that's evil, but the lack of regulation against corruption, so on and so forth.

You might say that a lot of what he seems to advocate for seems to be firmly liberal, but Liberalism is a conservative ideology if you're looking outside America's shortsighted left/right spectrum. I like Nolan's work, but I constantly see suppression of revolutionary ideology in his work. I don't think he hates progressivism, but I do think he's riding the center, which in America, means right-wing.

Oh yeah, spent a good part of a year playing it a few years back. Even made a few mods for it. My girlfriend was always pretty interested in it so we recently just started playing it together.