Hi I played Clonk a few years ago and now I've come back to play Open Clonk for a bit.

I was thinking about contributing a couple assets, too. Anyway I made a list of things that struck me while playing, I hope this helps somehow.

* When playing it's immedietaly apparent that a lot of time was invested to make the controls of the clonk feel right. Moving around the landscape feels fluid and is enjoyable and adding the ability to dig while climbing remove so much of the tedium the previous games presented the player with. I have to say though, one of the most well executed and satisfying special effects I've seen in games is the flint explosion.

Visual
* A big turn off at the moment are the bland visuals. I looked into your documentation and noticed that a dev had posted an example for good use of color regarding shadows (basically: "make them colored according to the surroundings"). However, I found no evidence in the game that this principle had been applied. I'm no programmer but I think simply giving the shadow pixels in mesh lighting and normal mapping a color would improve the visuals dramatically. The color could maybe be polled from the dominant color of the rendered image (excluding the fog of war probably) but I'm not a programmer.

* The detail level of meshes and landscape don't match. The landscape has extremely detailed textures with complex surfaces while buildings and trees barely have any surface definition and clonks completely lack it. Meshes need to be adjusted to the landscape or the other way around.

* Another point about the visuals are the textures. Again, the visual guidelines haven't been followed. A simple example would be to give the root area of the tree some visible dirt on it and the stem growing from the ground some faintly visible moss. I'd be willing to contribute some texture work here.

Controls
* Make the pickaxe spawn items at the clonk's feet. Otherwise pickaxe mining is just frustrating since you keep getting hit by objects and it cancels the animation, requiring the player to click again.

* Throwing objects is also much more satisfying to do since the trajectory can be determined by pointing the cursor. However since the objects lose their momentum quite quickly throwing something accurately is very difficult. I propose that upon holding down the appropriate button and after a slight delay a trajectory is displayed to make mining with flints easier. I would also give this treatment to the bow. Shooting short range is accurate but on a moving target at long range it gets silly quickly.

* It doesnt make sense that the number keys change the left hand since that's the "main button" that is used most often. (set preference in menu?) The left button will most often have a shovel assigned to it (I'm a long time player picking the game up again though, so this may be biased).

Gameplay
* The bow is a very enjoyable to use weapon. Its sound effect, animation of the bow and velocity of the arrow are very well matched. However I had the impression strength and feeling don't quite match up. I'm not 100% sure how much damge the bow deals but in my opinion it should kill in two shots (or maybe ready faster?) since arming an arrow takes a second or so while running up to a clonk with a sword takes far less. This seems reasonable especially because there is sufficient counterplay to bows with the shield which blocks all damage if I'm not mistaken. Lastly, bow wielding should ready another arrow after shooting if the mouse button is still down. Currently you have to click for every shot.

* The range of swords should absolutely be slightly extended, you often miss your opponent by a hair which deflates the pacing of fights.

* Add toggle option for automatically collecting things in empty hand

* I was playing krakatoa and I would have liked it if clonks were to extinguish themselves after a while like in Clonk Rage

* Visual feedback of burning objects is a bit iffy. It would be much clearer if objects that are "on fire" would burst into flames much more violently for visual clarity.

* In my opinion, burning as a mechanic seems a bit outdated by now. It's been in the game since at least Clonk Planet and it's never really been fun. It just adds another layer of frustration since it's such a punishing mechanic because you often cannot do anything about a burning stack of flammable objects like wood or coal catching on fire and setting off a chain reaction until you have set up a means to deal with it (like a water pit) thirty minutes into the game.

User Interface
* The UI doesn't make sense. Upon pressing E the inventory of your clonk appears on screen EVEN THOUGH it's already on the left side. I read that you are going to rework the UI so you're probably aware of that.

* The UI numbering should be more clear. On a widescreen monitor you have to constantly look over to your items bar to check which item is in which slot. Put it on the mid-bottom of the screen.

* Stacks of items should be moveable in their entirety in the inventory screen.

Biggest problem
* This game needs more players, it needs to be advertised.  It's quite frankly rather pointless to develop a game for this long a time and not having a significant playerbase that can give you feedback, even if it's just a few dozen regulars.
Lack of variety in players means that you, the core developers, who are likely extremely experienced clonk players will fail to notice simple obstacles for new players and will out of tradition disregard need for change.
An example would be a very common phenomenon in programming where a peer has to look over your code to find an insignificant error which you would have never found since you got so used to seeing it.