Suggestions: Adjustable Stairs for Bases and Rock Smasher Upgrade

[Gemini]

OK, so I've run into two key frustrations when building bases: Rocks and Terrain Height.

For Rocks, we need a mid-game upgrade you can install which allows the multi-tool to smash them apart, plain and simple, up to a limit of course. Small and medium rocks should not be obstacles to long-term base building; large rocks can stay; you shouldn't be building super-close to them anyways. :P

For the terrain though, short of making it possible to adjust the position of an entire base in steps, which may be pushing things a bit, I would suggest an early-game base part which acts as an adjustable staircase link. You attach it to one side of a base and while not linked on the other side you can raise and lower that other side from a control panel by one or more steps, I would say limited to half a story of height, thus you would need to use two in sequence at maximum raising or lowering to span one story of the base. More importantly, this would allow you to expand upon a base that's being hard-limited by fluctuations in the terrain as opposed to any nearby obstacles, without having to resort to weird ladder extensions and full-story increments in height. Once connected to another base part or raised/lowered to match an existing base part, it would connect on both ends and could no longer be altered unless one of those base parts is removed.

[mysticmica]

Here's a work-around:

Find a hill and place a scaffold foundation on or near the top of the hill. Build a room and airlock on top of that scaffold. You may need to build a staircase depending on how you built that first section. Now just use scaffolds to extend your original scaffolding to increase your build area. Moving a scaffold ghost near an existing scaffold will cause the ghost to snap to the existing one, making it easier to get alignments. With a little fiddling around, you can get ghosts to snap to the bottom of an existing foundation. Scaffolds will half bury themselves if necessary to align with an existing scaffold as long as the ghost snapped to the desired face.

All that requires a few more iron in the beginning but it is a tiny amount relative to the total amount available on the planet and the huge amount that you will eventually use for the rest of the game. My final base had a few rooms with three stacked scaffolds out toward the edges of my base, but the main entrance was ground level. I did have a back-door in the elevated sections that I used when shooting around with my jetpack.

I hope this helps. It may take time if the dev decides to implement your suggestion.

[Gemini]

Oh, I wasn't looking for workarounds or anything. As a game developer myself I just find it important to offer solid feedback and ideas to other developers based on my own experiences with their games! I also know that it's basically just two people working on this one which means external feedback is just that much more important! Ultimately, it's up to the devs to decide which feedback to implement and which to reject! :B