Whoa, what a necro.
1. When taming animals you're supposed to leash them to hitching posts. But you can just leash them to trees and it works just as well. But you can take this one step further and use a shovel and q10 tree seeds to plant a ton of trees, because tiny baby 1% grown trees can be hitched to as well. When you're taming 20+ animals at the same time this is a massive time-saver.
2. I just learned this and it kinda shocked me, but buckets have a unique property where when you drop them on the ground, you can transfer substances between them just like a barrel. You can leave a bucket of water on the ground and draw it up into waterskins for example. All buckets of anything take a long time to despawn too (more than 2 IRL days at least. I've left a bucket of bad ql tar for three days straight and not had it despawn i'm pretty sure).