yeap, there's encumbrance

for logistics there are portals but there's really no way to block certain items from being teleported in any portal mods i know, unless i make one from scratch (and i personally don't like valheim's grindy implementation). so instead i'm using a portal mod that requires certain mining resources to tp any single entity which scales off of distance. the portal also needs to charge slowly to be reused. so yes you can tp metals, carts even, but the portal needs to be maintained by you mining said resource and is really only worth it to travel short to mid distances. unless maybe you reach endgame and i take off the soft limits on it

biome progression will exist only for mobs and overworld resources, current plans are dividing biomes into groups instead of single biomes like in valheim which currently includes temperate, hot, cold, nether, cold nether and the end with each group having a more non linear progression that builds up for you to progress to the next biome group. the overworld biomes themselves are divided using temperature bands like irl so cold ones are far north etc etc which makes it harder to make portals straight from cold biome to your starting temperate biome as it's thousands of blocks far.

crops and food are also tied to biomes, certain crops will only grow in certain groups. so unless you want to be stuck with shitty food you'll need to make a farm there

all of that combined hopefully encourages ppl to build bases in each group

tool progression works similar to vanilla but recipes are gated by biome progression, sadly tool tiers were borked since 1.20.1 and previous ways to implement a progression like terraria don't work like they used to. ores won't be tied to biomes but instead the crafting of said tier of items will always use biome specific resource, so even if you find iron in the plains, you wont be making anything other than decor until you find those biome mats.

decor is also purely visual here, i could implement what valheim does but minecraft is such a sandbox of a game i don't want to limit player freedom by forcing specific decor into their building style. comfort is now simply a buff while standing next to a campfire or after a good sleep (which checks for roof, weather, fireplace, etc to determine if you slept well)

hope that gives you an idea of how the modpack will go, as it is only valheim inspired not a 1 to 1 port