Persistent dirt pathing

[itworkss]

I've always been a big fan of dirt paths in the game, but they get taken over so quickly by grass and forest terrain. Don't get me wrong, I love that mechanic.

I would however like to see some way to create persistent dirt paths. These could 'decay' outside of claimed land, just as tiles do.

Here are several options that I see:

Salt the Earth

Spread salt on a tile to prevent it from growing any grass or forest tile.
Can be reverted by plowing, or planting grass seed.
Would require new recipe to 'break' salt down into more uses, so it wouldn't require a ridiculous amount to create a short path.

Gravel path

This is slightly different than the way 'stomp to dirt' looks, maybe a bit of rocks thrown in, some grass around the edges.
Crush 'x' amount of any rocks into 'gravel' item.
It would function just like pavement in terms of decay.

Desire Paths

This would be the coolest option probably, but also the hardest to implement.
The terrain would register where it's walked on commonly, and turn to dirt if it's stepped on 'x' amount of times.
The tile would then also be more resistant to natural competition by grass and forest tiles moving in, this would create an even more natural feel.




As a disclaimer, I know you can effectively create 'dirt' paths by outlining them with pavement, but it just doesn't work as well for a natural aesthetic.

[shubla]

Ground turning into dirt after being walked over multiple times has been suggested before, and loftar said something about it being too hard to implement nicely. I am pretty sure that there are some clever ways to implement it.
1:100 chance for counter to increase, if it is more than x the ground is dirt. If it less, it reverts to something else. I don't know how many tiles are loaded in ram at once. Is it really so many that even 1 more byte for each tile is too much?
If it is, maybe we could have counter for bigger area than 1 tile. Like one counter for 5x5 areas and when the counter passes certain value, next tile walked over would change to dirt. Decay would decrease counter and remove dirt tiles as it goes down.
Just some thoughts. Without information about count of tiles loaded at the same time and such it is difficult to think of solutions.
One option would be not to have any counters. Only random chance for tile to turn to dirt. This would result in random tiles of dirt everywhere thogh... Of course, if dirt quickly reverts, it might not be an issue. Areas with lot of traffic would naturally be full of dirt, as there would be many more chances of tiles turning to dirt.
Devs should try at least something. Above option sounds like it would be easy to implement. Game is in alpha after all, it could be just reverted if it does not work.

[Granger]

As loftar stated in some other topic that underground levels store elevation information (while being completely flat)... I doubt memory being the issue.
But I suspect that the map data isn't versioned so he can't easily add another dimension to it in a running world.