The loot in the vanilla game needs some tweaks at min, and possibly some other crafting functionality. Loot is boring, to say the least, once you can buy what you need from Haldor it's just junk.

At min, I would like to see weapons/tools found in loot that could even maybe have special traits. Nothing crazy, just a reason to keep looting POIs. Then, I would like to see old equipment and looted weapons be able to get broken down with at least a chance to get ore. This could also help the issue of not being able to get iron to build a stone cutter till after your base is being destroyed if you didn't moat it. For real, game needs a way to at least be able to get a few bits of iron early to have a reason to maybe not moat every base. Not enough to be reasonable to grind gear before the Elder of course.

Not bothering with mods till the patches and updates are more stable, so yeah, I am ignorant of their nuances for now. Any ways, assumptions made above is the main point there.