General Terraforming Thoughts

[Lpzie]

I have spent the past month only terraforming the area around my base (you've never seen ground so flat before). It's safe to assume I have dug, stockpiled, and moved over 70k units of dirt on one single character. In that time, I have had some thoughts about the whole process.

1) Dirt on the ground goes back into the ground too fast. If we could get an extra 30 seconds before this occurs, I could dig from full stamina until I was no longer able to dig without losing dirt back into the ground.

2) The metal shovel is inadequate as it currently is. Could we get something similar to how the pickaxe scales with quality and with str? Or rework the stamina/energy consumption?

#2 is because the stamina/energy consumption probably needs a tweak. I've eaten so much food to gain energy that even with hot tea it's troublesome. I feel as if digging is scaled to work over small amounts but terraforming just isn't feasible in any sort of reasonable timescale. I have basically paid for a month subscription only to dig dirt.

[Onep]

I would definitely like to see some buff to metal shovels and either their energy consumption or speed. It just drains an extreme amount of stamina and energy to terraform any area of size. I went through about 7 alts to dig up ~15,000 units of soil. Lately, I've actually started to feed my serf carrots and now he has ~40 per.

[Sevenless]

Coming from other games where terraforming is impactful in more ways than haven, I want to argue against this. I want to tell you to move to a better building site. I want to say that terraforming is like tree cutting, and should be reserved as high effort to prevent griefing.

But with the current haven teraforming impact (flat lets you build, that's it), I can't argue against you. So long as the devs don't plan to tie in terraforming to more game mechanics, I don't see the harm in making it easier.

[sabinati]

They extended the decay time recently, is it actually still too short? I agree with #2 as well and I'd like to see this extend to tree chopping and digging. Tool type and quality and stats makes a huge difference in mining, I don't see why we couldn't extend the same to other stamina intensive tasks.

[sabinati]

Also it would be dope if we could pull from piles when filling with survey tool.

[Granger]

Also it would be dope if we could pull from piles when filling with survey tool.

This.

Or even better, link two surveys: one to dig, one to fill.

[Onep]

Also it would be dope if we could pull from piles when filling with survey tool.

This.

Or even better, link two surveys: one to dig, one to fill.

By the gods! This pleaaaaase!

[Lpzie]

I suppose #1 has been addressed then. I did notice the units taking longer to decay but thought it was just my imagination.

Yeah, #2 should probably be applied to other tools but if not, shovel should get it.

I've thought a lot about the link one survey to another, to dig one and fill another. I think it would be great but I'm not sure if that's the direction jnl want to go simply because of one little trait that surveys already have. Say you make a 31x31 plot, and dig at one corner of it. . . if the only fill location is at the other diagonal corner, the dirt goes into your inventory. Makes me think they'd rather keep the distance you can fling the dirt somewhat realistic and not tied to the survey.

So, failing that, I've thought of an alternative. Some sort of conveyor belt that would let me link surveys but then I realized that the conveyor belt needs to be powered and there's nothing in the game that could do that except probably a horse with a carrot on a string dangling in front of it.

The best I came up with is some slide-like structure that works like a conveyor belt but gravity does the moving. It only goes one way, which is as desired. But the construction would require a lot of wood, which probably isn't worth it unless you're doing large scale terraforming (as I am).

Either way, I'm not even convinced the last one is all that good. Which is why I settled for just a buff to the shovel.