One thing that is only somewhat called out in the first posts is that the Hylian/Hyruleans have access to a digging weapon late in their "tech tree", the
handy glove. It's downstream of blocks, rough gems, and gold and silver*, though, which means unlocking it requires a lot of trade or careful pre-embark planning.
*It's produced at the Hylian Temple, which requires 43 rock blocks, 24 rough gems, a stone table, a spare longsword, 3 gold statues, 3 gold bars, and a silver bar. It's also "magic" (which just means that a magic vase item is used in its recipe), which means that you need to either hunt a lot of monsters for random drops, or build an Item Exchange (3 blocks) so that you can search items for magic.
All in all, it's simpler just to add picks XD.
Incidentally, I've been playing a fort for a while now and I discovered that I still have the personality changes that were supposed to make people a bit more prone to tantrums/etc, from back before the memory system was introduced. So far it hasn't been a big problem, but you probably want to be aware of it :/. I'll push the version that patches it out.
Edit: pushed.
This version also includes another couple BotW weapons (zora spears, feathered spears, rito bows, serpentine spears, as well as the Lightscale Trident and the Eagle Bow as special weapons).
More importantly, this version implements the Casting Forge, which lets your legendary weaponsmiths make masterwork exotic items using traded-for earthware templates. As pushed, each template is good for only one item, though commented-out tags are included that would allow for other configurations (fully reusable works without bugs, % based improves the template to match the quality of the produced item, which was not intended :[ )