That’s uh, that’s a long post. I’ll try to answer things in this in as orderly fashion as I can here.

As far as movement goes, the ideal way to play the game at the moment is with a keyboard and mouse. I understand that this can cause issues for laptop players though. A while back it was suggested that I make a control scheme purely for the keyboard. It’s something I hope to eventually do, but I couldn’t give you a time frame unfortunately. While I would like to just put it in, adapting a game that was made to use a mouse to just a keyboard is going to be quite a bit of work. Still I will do my best to accommodate as soon as I can.

In regards to your comments on player alignment. The system that is in the game is similar to Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon. It isn’t perfect, but it’s the best this genre has come up with so far. That said I do have it listed to take another stab at alignment for the interaction tile to see if I can get it to feel better. I’ve gotten several comments about it feeling off and personally I can understand that. So, in short it is something I’d like to revisit, but as you might guess there’s a lot vying for my attention with the game in alpha. Hopefully that doesn’t come across snarky, as I don’t mean it like that.

As far as the ladders on the wall thing goes yeah, there are some z ordering issues. The whole engine needs a rework, until I do that there are several oddities that won’t probably align above or below you. It is however on my list of things to do soon.

You shouldn’t be able to walk through livestock unless something has gone wrong with patching, which for that particular aspect at least, I find unlikely. What version of the game are you on?

I’ll check the collision masks in the barn to be safe on the pitchfork thing

The Livestock Status title has been noted, my artist is in the process of correcting it.

I’ll check dialogue for Mel.

I’ll also correct the spelling on the perk.

As for saving I don’t really want to give you the ability to save at any time because it opens up opportunities for people to abuse systems in the game. Basically, save scumming could easily become a thing if I allow that. It would likely have several other unseen consequences. It is one of the things I’m more adamant on. I am sorry you’ve run into glitches and lost progress. Hopefully, you are playing on the newest versions. As far as I can tell few people run into game breaking bugs at this point. Or if they are, they aren’t reporting them. While it probably isn’t the kindest answer, I’d rather not alter the save system to compensate for temporary problems. The bugs will eventually be gone.

I’ll check into stacking objects. That code for inventory management is fairly old, it was one of the first things I wrote into this game. There were a couple of other related things I was going to check in the near future, I’ll add this to the list to see if it can be done.

Other people have mentioned wanting some sort of minimap for the game. I haven’t determined exactly what I want to do but I am brainstorming on it.

Its been suggested by another player that there should be something that they specified as “helpfiles” which would basically serve as a smaller in game wiki. I’m not opposed to the idea, but it would require a lot of time to put all the information together and present it well, not to mention commissioning any related art. Once again, I’m not opposed to doing something like this but it falls under Quality of Life. Changes like that are important, but I have to balance them against fixing bugs and adding playable content to the game.

Wishlist has also been suggested, its something I wouldn’t mind doing, but as I said above QoL stuff has to be balanced against other things. Still, it’s something that will probably go in some day.

The day night cycle could vary per season, I’ve noted it down as a potential change to make.

Quartz will be more relevant down the road so you can obtain it at any level. I’m also not sure what version you are playing but mining was rebalanced I think on version 0.17. Still further balancing is probably required so I’ll take your comments under consideration.

Further development of NPCs is definitely planned. It’s one of those things that is on the backburner at the moment. First, I’d like to just get everyone in the game. Once that is done there are still tons of quests to add, which in my personal opinion give at least a little bit of flavor to characters. Relationships and marriage will obviously be a thing later on as well.

Finally, to explain it briefly, the “topic” button you see in conversations will eventually have a different purpose. The general plan is that as you play and explore the world, you’ll unlock topics of conversation with NPCs, usually things that are relevant to their character. These dialogues should be a bit more extensive and serve to give characters more depth. This sort of thing will probably play into a friendship system of some sort. The reason this stuff isn’t there yet is mostly because in terms of bang for your buck (hopefully that’s a universal phrase) having extended conversations is a pretty small amount of gameplay. I’m under the assumption that people would rather have the larger gameplay systems added rather than a one-time paragraph of extra conversation.

Hopefully that answers everything for you. I feel like I just typed a small novel.