Comment (by Roland Haas):

Yup, WONTFIX. The *Base variables also declare the parameters that control what is set as ID an those parameter have to have value. Someone then has to act on that parameter value and it the thorn that introduced the value is (naturally) the only one guaranteed to be around.

The other issue is that the *Base thorns not setting ID can lead to situations of not setting ID at all (namely if no ID thorn is activated). Really the ID thorns are the ones that must look at the intiail_foo parameters and then set their ID. The *Base thorns already do look at those parameters and only set the data to vacuum / Minkowski if the parameter values tell them to do so.
How many timelevels are needed for a variable is actually something that is usually determined by a combination of the evolution thorn, Carpet and the time stepper. Keep in mind that multiple STORAGE: foo[n] statements for the same foo in mulitple thorns is valid, the largest n is what gets used. Namely STORAGE allocates at least n levels of storage, not exactly.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2628/admbase-hydrobase-etc-should-not-set-up