I'm playing with 2 other people so, 3 player game total. We find it hard to maintain sustainable food supplies early game. Same with water but we can manage with leaves/dirty water long enough. Does anyone have advice?
If you want the easiest food possible; get soybeans as quickly as you can. When you have soybeans and rice you have everything you need to make cheese burgers which are an incredible food source. From there you just need to get lettuce and tomato and you'll never have to worry about Spice of Life again as long as you only eat when you're missing 5 full bars of hunger.
Also find a way to manually kill zombies and relatively quickly you'll be able to get carrots and potatoes which both are great food sources as well. Before that the soups are your best bet along with toast.
Is there an easy way to prevent bats from spawning anywhere in the game while not directly affecting the spawn rates of anything else in the game? Evidently I've gone too deep outside my base and now it seems like half the mobs are bats simply because they pile up after awhile.
Their spawning rules are supposed to be a dark area that doesn't have the ability to see the sky so basically eliminate those with microblocks, slabs or otherwise. As for getting rid of them they should follow the same despawning rules as hostile mobs(Be > 24 blocks away and they eventually despawn).