First time suggesting ideas on here, but I had a couple things come into mind in the past few days of playing that I thought would be good to post.
1) Animal corpses or entrails as 'wards' around bases. If you've played The Forest you've probably encountered a similar concept. In that game, you can build effigies that keep the cannibals away from camp. My idea would be that you can kill predators (or prey, really) and use their corpses or entrails to make a ward (spike in the ground or a box on the ground, whatever) that wards off that type of creature, in a radius, for an amount of time. It prevents us from having to use turrets to defend our bases and harvesting areas, but still encourages us to go out and kill things on occasion to refuel the wards. To prevent players from placing wards all over an entire island and completely destroying all spawns, they could be limited to placement within a certain foundation range or only placeable on walls or foundations.
2) Further refining resources to get more benefit. As an example I'll use wood, but this can be used for most of the primary resources (thatch, wood, stone, fiber, metal). For wood, you could add a sawmill structure down in the construction tree. You can still harvest wood with a regular hatchet and get a modest amount, or you could use a logging saw. The logging saw would add an extremely heavy single piece of lumber (basically the whole tree) that you have to haul back to your base. Once it's back, you can process the lumber in a sawmill, which would give you more wood than you would have gotten with the hatchet. It requires more steps and more work, but in the end you get more benefit. For thatch you could use the sawmill as well, fiber could be processed in a cotton gin or similar, and metal could be refined in a blast furnace or something. This would also enable bulls, cows, and horses to have more uses. There could be a lumber saddle that lets you drag logs behind, greatly reducing the weight of the large trees but only letting you drag one at a time.
This ties into the resource weight reduction issue we're having right now. I think most of us would be fine with no weight reduction provided there were ways to increase the amount we gather or reduce the time needed to gather resources. As a survival game I understand that gathering is necessary, but as time goes on, like in Ark, you should be given more ways to gather resources and gather them more efficiently. It's a natural power progression for humans to develop ways of doing things easier. By the time we're sailing on galleons and brigantines, we would have logically developed ways of getting more resources for them besides simple hatchets.
