Very nice suggestions! I've thought about a lot of these already. For sure the combat and weapons/gear need to be focused on a lot. I am really still in the base building part right now. Animal taming is cool and I was for sure thinking of racing them and them having different stats. So many good ideas here.
I thought about the different weapons sort of like how Fallout does it. You can craft different type of barrels, mags, sights, stocks and receivers to make different guns. So you'd have a bench dedicated to building the parts and then bring the parts to another bench to create the gun. Creating those parts make the gun behave differently.