jordancoles wrote:I would destroy every cave on a mountain or deny entire continents of a free entrance to lvl 1
As a far more motivated griefer than you I don't believe you would do wholemeal cave removal for areas to any significant degree. Maybe bash one or two adjacent to people's bases that they're clearly using at most. If your entire continent only had 4 caves you could've just put pclaims in front of them. It would've been a 30 minute task if the time includes making alts specifically for it.
Even if that's a significant fear, I would personally rather a minor setback in the early game over having a bunch of bullshit in my village stopping me from making it to my desired specifications. The only time I see it really fucking people over is super early on when they're still living out of a cave - which I see as more of a speedrun strat than something regular players will be doing all throughout the world.
To alleviate that it could require either being claimed, just more strength than people will have 2 weeks in (20-25 soak), require a siege engine, require a shovel over a certain quality(100-200), or be reversible within a certain timeframe.