I’d like to see the ashlands have a pretty significant biome mechanic like some of the other biomes. Something akin to the summer season in Don’t Starve, where rather than the night time being cold and treacherous, the daytime is actually the harder time of day due to the heat. Running around at day too long results in you getting heat exhaustion and reducing movement speed/stamina regen/increasing food decay. Additionally, enemies in the ashlands have increased spawn rates during the day, like other biomes do at night.

You can either craft or build things to temporarily cool you off/rehydrate you, or instead use a new ashlands tier bed to sleep till night and traverse while it is cooler. Some enemies only spawn and exist at day though, so you’ll have to juggle with the mechanics to obtain certain items. Being near a fire would not give you a rested buff (it would only further exhaust you), and being exhausted would rapidly decrease the buff of being rested.

Building a base and being sheltered would prevent you from increasing your exhaustion so you could live in the ashlands and survive during the heat of day, but you’ll have to craft new ashlands base alternatives to campfires and hearths to be resting in your base there. In addition, any wood building piece would begin to burn in the heat of day (including workbenches and portals) thus you must either use stone, black marble, or new ashlands building pieces made of ash wood, the trees of the biome.

Since portals and workbenches burn, you need to make sure they aren’t exposed (as non-exposed wood does not burn), but this must be done with stone, black marble, or ash wood, as normal wood not only burns anyway, but does not insulate heat. Burning portals are completely unusable, but burning workbenches can be used to place items to allow you to prevent it from burning.