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Needed Teraforming Talent(s)/Tools


Warlander

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I have been off and on been teraforming a cluster of tiles with 3 central tiles which will be my central hub as well as a ring of tiles around those and flattening it all down to a flat base before I can build it back up again to make the best use of teravoxels and core limits to get the best bang for my buck without having to buy multiple accounts. I have learned a lot spending the last 8+ months trying to build the central 3 tiles up to the 100m limit before realizing that it was not the best way to go about it and needing to flatten it all back down to the base which I am still in the process of doing.

 

But throughout this project many things have become clear that the tools are fairly lacking either on purpose so you have to do a lot more mining for precision or that the devs seem to want more jagged vertices for whatever reason adding more processing power. Outside of the memory leak that forces me to restart 5+ times a day when I am lowering terrain the max amount allowed there is certainly many tools that need to be added or talents to make teraforming more viable in general as a round about solution to voxels vs teravoxels in general.

 

First I will say that Teraforming in general is very terious work unless you are brining the terrain down. You can bring it down quite a bit at a time but unless you want to add teravoxels to the landscape it takes 10x longer to do so and the spherical nature of the voxels or not having any kind of voxel land grid can be quite infuriating at times since you are flying blind and it is nearly impossible to get nice clean straight lines. It can be done but it can also be a pain in the ass to accomplish on the correct grid which does exist even if you cant see it.

 

But also that replacing voxels of a large scale is even more of a pain in the ass using spheres which create all sorts of pockets and cracks that seem unnecessary if you are trying to change the base color of the terrain to match what you want or need it to look like and having to spend an absorbant amount of time to place down blobs and smooth them out to get any sort of desired result.

 

This new texture change as far as teraforming and replacement of voxels goes looks entirely different from when you gather the materials to what they look like when placed down and often times they look exactly the same with little flecks or differences but the colors are pretty much exactly the same regardless if it looks like the color should be much darker based on the icons and it is all pretty dull and boring vs the older textures which actually looked different in gradient from all the same texture types. Not to mention only having tundra, snow, and sand without stone, dirt, grass, or plant items you can place as organic props to spruce up an area without requiring a core and mashing together a tree of some sort outside the forest biome is kinda puzzling as well.

 

Additionally there is and should be a difference between metals and stone minerals and things like limestone, granite, etc should be what the land itself should be made out of not a node like metals. There should be mountains of the stuff since the dirt teravoxels are pretty much useless and are either discarded or never actually collected. There are moons that are pretty much destroed to the point where it looks like an unfinished deathstar they are so destroyed and dirt should really have some kind of value in sifting to get trace amounts of metals or stone in which to build with. This finite resource system is not working out without some kind of solar system wife healing via earthquakes.

 

Lastly you should be many more textures and options for teraforming in order to be able to make your tile(s) look better without requiring cores and building the foundations of the cores first. Any stone based voxels should also be included in what can be placed down via teraforming to accomplish this.

 

With that said here are a bunch of talents and tools that need to be added to the game which are absolutely necessary:

 

  • Teraforming Build Mode: If you are the owner of the tile you should be able to hit B as if you were looking at a core and have all the same tools as building and using voxels on a core. There is no need for cores unless you need to serve some sort of purpose or function like a factory or you want to use metal voxels.
  • If Teraforming Build mode is not possible then there should be a sepperate tool just like the flatten tool but instead of being round should be square to make it easier to make clean planed surfaces or add back terrain back to the landscape in the same capacity as the flatten tool takes it away.
  • Teraforming Chisel: There is a need to be able to chisel out fine details from the terrain and a tool like a chisel in which has the ability to go down to 1vx x 1vx is really needed in a square perhaps up to 5x5 vx in a square could really go a long way with the ability to hit CTRL and scroll the size to the desired look
  • Raise Voxel Tool: Since you can only really reliably raise the land by either putting down blobs of teravoxels then planing it off and then flattingening and hoping you are within the 5vx meter threshold to where it makes a flat surface before the rebar type voxels appear it would really be nice if there was a tool to raise the landscape properly and efficiently or just increasing the height that can be raised by the flattening tool since 5 meter layers are a huge pain in the ass especially when you are doing a project that is multiple tiles in nature.
  • Teravoxel Replacement Tool: There is a huge need for the simple ability to just replace teravoxels with something else rather then putting down blobs and creating pockets and micro voxels aritfacts in the process. Just simply being able to replace even the top 1vx layer on the surface would be a huge step forward in what can be done using teravoxels as a viable option to using metal voxels.
  • Talents to also shring the size of the mining tool in addtion to increasing the size would also be a good alternative to some tools listed above.
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  • 1 month later...

Lots of good stuff I agree with here, a fewer minor changes I might personally make a tad different, not going to mention them because I only want to support and the Devs always end up doing things close to what I want anyways. 

 

Some of us want to make nice looking gardens!

 

Possibly not possible, but I'd like to be able to flatten at an angle?

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