giving us the 2 AA's in 1.04 sort of removed all need for water for me. I got lucky and it rained and I collected ton of water. Am I the only one (reading through this topic) that didn't dig up some dust and put out the fires first before I sealed myself away? the book even says stay away from burning ships :}
The only bug I got was the quest to turn in the leadstone battery (which u know about). I had to NEI one in and it worked fine. charged/nocharge, no clue. guess you solved that out already for 1.05...
I just setup a 2 high wall of dust around my perimeter, have an area nearby that I go in and dig out dust and come back before nightfall (got stuck once cause it turned to night while raining and didn't realize, almost died). creepers have killed me 3 times, twice w/o me even seeing them. all early stages. Setup slabs on walls then go around (during day) and add a lip of slabs so keeps spiders away. chose a nice entrance far away from middle of base and made an entrance for creatures, and am laying punji sticks as I get the cane. I just axe some nearby doors (wood blocks) to get in/out of base. run around the edge walls at daybreak to collect goodies.
I finished the quests, expanding base, decided I needed netherrack for enderium and went there. caught fire by some lava and got heat stroke 3. luckilly, I had made some healing potions/regen potions and used them all till I got into heat stroke 2. Noticed that ICE and SNOW don't have any settings in envirominer to cool you off. is that intended? that was a pain. lava is your hellfish's (ala AG skies).
Speaking of ag skies, I learned something using ur pack and I feel pretty stupid. I've played through AG a couple times (finished all quests once). All that time, I didn't realize you can pound the gravel sifted ores into smaller components and if you have fortune on your hammer, get more back, and so on till dust. thus, quadrupling your ores, etc... (estimate). cool!
I second the sprinkler. Used that w/bonemeal as much as I can.
btw, you mentioned animal spawns. I had squids spawning in my AA pool but that's it. it's all ocean biome, right? I saw no way whatsoever to get any passive mobs. which leads me to: jetpacks. total red herring? didn't realize you needed leather for a harness. Thus, no leather, no jetpacks. why even include it in the pack then? Bummed me out incredibly.
I wanted to explore, and go to nether w/o worrying about lava.
Otherwise, it was short, but sweet. and I'm still playing through. not sure if I'll want to do a world reset so might wait till you've upped the amount of quests or give us some way to get animals (even late game). maybe make spawn eggs require nether star or something?
btw. Love the wood frying pan, running off of wood as fuel. how does it work? I do not know. it just does. :}