Heyo, yeah, the game isn't perfect, but I do have a few solutions to some of the problems you posted.
First of all, you didn't find any gold because gold ore turns to diamond ore while it rains. It should only rain for a few minutes, although the lag you experienced may have caused it to last longer. (There is an item you can craft using a 3x3 amount of gold that toggles the rain, but it doesn't seem like that would have really helped in your case, considering the circumstances).
The lag, by the way, is caused by travelling too far away from the spawn area, and is a bug I didn't manage to fix before release. (Resources are renewable by the way, by placing saplings on different types of surfaces; ie, planting trees on water will give you lilypads, and planting them on stone will give you different ores).
Additionally, I know this wasn't telegraphed well, but pressing c while crafting allows you to make the object without removing items from the crafting grid, effectively adding a way to make large quantities of items at once.
Also, yeah, the map is practically infinitely large and randomly generated.
Anyways, thanks for the review.