Has anyone been able to get environment modification to work?

[Michett]

I can't seem to get any environment modified... I have a 100K soil pile, stone and steel but whatever I try, the game reports "Lack of item". I must be missing something basic but can't figure out what exactly :( Any help would be highly appreciated :)

[Gijs]

You need to craft the foundations first. They're in the bottom right corner of your replicator menu. Or you can automate them.

[ShpöngleKraftverk]

From what you wrote; seems you need to build Foundations either in replicator or assembler.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

As these other two have said, you need to craft foundations.

The soil pile is effectively the 'filler' for the terrain, while the foundation creates 'plates' to walk on. From a logical standpoint, this is a twist from factorio's Landfill and Concrete procedures mashed into one large process.

To do this efficiently, you will want to set up a factory to make foundation over time. ONE, foundation plate is one, one-meter tile of the terrain. If you hit the + key on your number pad, you can expand the cursor size of the foundation as far as 10x10, or 100 tiles. This is the size of one 'large' grid square on a planet's surface. Foundation stacks in sets of 1,000, so every stack of foundation will cover 10 [large] grid squares. Plan accordingly.

Your soil filler pile will get smaller whenever you fill oceans, and will grow larger when you consume hills. It's a simple concept that may not be the most well explained when reading the instructions in real time. But quite simply, you're taking the mountains and dumping them into the oceans so that everything is level. It's a simple goal. You want flat terrain for your factory.

A few things that aren't pointed out in the information from the game are two-fold.

1: Every time you place a building down, it automatically flattens the terrain it's on and gives you the soil for it. So you aren't losing anything by placing buildings.

2: If you foundation a single tile space, it levels the adjacent tiles. Meaning that a one-tile foundation levels all 8 tiles around it (for a total of 9 tiles leveled). Your soil pile is affected accordingly.

[Michett]

Thanks everybody! So yes, I missed something really basic :P

[Shazam]

I'll be honest, I never even noticed that Tile until you said something :D

[mreed2]

This, I think is a bug: In every other case, when you click on something that you can place and don't have a building of that type, the game displays a message saying something along the lines of "No building available, double click to access replicator". When you click on a foundation this message doesn't appear, even if you have 0 foundations in your inventory.

Yes, I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to use foundations because of this bug, why do you ask? :)