HunchBluntley: but there's a huge amount of organizing & building that I really need to do
WingedKagouti: No you don't need to do that.
Seriously, just let everything remain where it is for now and then do the reorganizing in the 1.3 world once you start on that. Reorganizing an old world is work, setting up a properly organized town in a new world is fun.
For
some people it's fun. Not for me, apparently. I derive most of my pleasure in this game from exploring the surface, spelunking in caves, and loot-gathering and crafting (though I really don't make much that isn't strictly utilitarian, which means a lot of the purely cosmetic stuff is somewhat superfluous to me). In my secondary world, my secondary character doesn't even have a single main base yet, and storage chests are scattered between about four different locations, including a couple of living wood trees with rooms inside where I just put up torches and said "Good enough." I started on a "floating fortress", hovering just above one of those giant trees, but I only built the entrance, two small NPC rooms, and a simple bedroom for my character before I kind of trailed off in a fit of
meh. So starting yet another world, where I'll also wind up just getting by with the bare minimum of storage and NPC housing, is not very appealing to me. And if I want to keep playing in my existing worlds (and I do), I
will have to bite the bullet and, at the very least, finish my storage expansion and sort all my shit (in my main world) and build a unified main storage area, plus at least a little more NPC housing (in my secondary world).
I might, at some point, just say "Fuck it" and back up my 1.2.4.1 world and character data, then install 1.3.[whatever] and start from scratch, but I wouldn't import my old saves into the new version, and I would want to go back to them in 1.2.4.1 at some point. I
might do that...but I'm not there yet. (I wouldn't be surprised if 1.4 is out by the time I get around to upgrading. :) )