The random options in Ruins really are great, I've never thought of using them to make hills or dunes haha! That would make the drab sea of dust so much more exciting than it is now. You could even (rarely) hide something nice (but not amazing) inside the dunes, like Tinkers' gravel ores.
I'm thinking I want to keep playing 1.11 with the new map and Zombie Awareness disabled. It's really making me struggle to survive again, and I'm building new strategies as a result. Also, my frying pan and gun are getting more use lol, and that makes me really feel like a lone hunter who has to kill to survive, rather than a Trench Pickup Worker handling my 8am workload. I'm thinking of ways to make a little fortification where I can lure enemies closer and then duck back down into cover to strike them through murder holes of sorts. I was thinking of adding a few extensions onto the ship, actually... I don't want to break any of it, so I might add defensive walls to the sides and top and build a resource farm on top of it.
I completely agree. Things change dramatically without ZA. I'm still trying to figure out an early strategy myself. A dark room might be a good solution.
I actually had a crazy idea while pulling an all-nighter. Imagine if, whenever Minecraft attempted to spawn a hostile mob, it counted against the mob cap whether the mob successfully spawned or not. I'm talking something like (but less than) the 30 second countdown of an inactive but spawned mob's timer, here. Having one tiny dark room would suddenly change from 'where'd all the mobs suddenly come from hey look at the river of bones coming out' to 'I guess it wouldn't make sense for a hundred monsters to suddenly appear in this spot because it's the only dark spot nearby'. I think the number of spawn attempts per tick would need to be increased, or the timer on the spawn-fails to be significantly less than a full 30 seconds, because of the sheer number of failed spawn attempts with how Notch coded it. But it'd be even more brutal and would nip those sky spawners and so forth in the bud, hardcore.
Just an idea that my sleep-deprived brain came up with, though.