Encountered a chicken storm the other day. Probably just something silly for Christmas. It just kept raining chickens. They made no sounds and self destructed upon touching the ground without damaging anything. You couldn't interact with them like attack them either.
I went exploring around my spawn. Marked off waypoints on my mini map for two nearby villages, a volcano, a very large oil deposit, and a greatwood tree. Pics will follow as I start doing things with them. I also used this time to collect some resources like sand, clay, and leather.
Back at home I made a small macerator/generator/electric furnace setup but I wasn't happy with it's performance. That led me to go with three steam engines, a pulverizer, and a powered furnace. The pulverizer on the left will hold up to five stacks thanks to the attached hopper. It then takes every ore and turns each one into two pieces of dust. The pulverizer then feed the furnace which takes each dust and converts it into an ingot effectively giving me two ingots per ore. Then the furnace places the ingots into the chest,
The steam engines require water, coal, and a redstone signal to run but are efficient. It took less than 18 coal to pulverize and smelt 6 stacks of ores.