Thanks for taking the time to write the feedback! Most of your thoughts about design actually mirror our own. Right now I believe we can actually make this work with some more polish.
You mentioned
> it is too easy to lose expensive items (in part due to bugs)
Can you elaborate what bugs did you encounter?
I'm also interested in how did your save fail?
Regarding item loss, I had an issue where I broke a pipe connector and lost the pipe connected to it. I think there was also an issue of some items getting trapped when placing tiles on them, although this was sort of expected. Also, and I'm not sure this is a bug or not, but items that fall into the ocean tend to disappear. ... I think this may be an issue in part because metal is somewhat rare. For the save file failure, I was holding down the fast-forward key for a while, pruned some branches off of a tree (the waterfruit, I think?) and then saved and exited. The game appeared to exit normally, but the log ends differently:
02:26:33 [DEBUG] (3) main::game: Next day ready 02:26:33 [INFO] Settings saved 02:26:34 [ERROR] Terminal must be dropped after all `Escape`s 02:26:34 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/game/mod.rs:334 02:26:34 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/update_loop.rs:157
Running it again, I get:
02:10:12 [DEBUG] (3) main::game: Next day ready 02:11:12 [INFO] Settings saved 02:11:12 [ERROR] Terminal must be dropped after all `Escape`s 02:11:12 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/game/mod.rs:434 02:11:12 [ERROR] thread '<unnamed>' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: "SendError(..)"': main/src/update_loop.rs:129
