There should be more canned food recipies in game without modding those :)
Maybe add some special tools for doing those canned foods to make them not so easy to make.
Shovel gravel patches on surface to get idea what should be found and dig down some and hope you find the vein. Got ~3k coal for doing this, digging maybe that 10-14 blocks down.
Those heat seeker zombies bothers quite lot, maybe old bandits should have had that AI. Stone tools are a bit meh for first 20 levels, maybe some scrap iron tools for lvl 5 or 10 would be nice addition.
What comes stamina, yes it slows game a bit but no biggie, couple perk points to stamina and...
I think this is a good system to have, you need to do some decision what to take or leave if you want go without slowing down.
Most likely couple days / weeks after the stable release there will be a bunch of mods that 'fixes' this for those who dont like it.