Digging Frustrations: Any Tips?

[thelefthorse]

I am loving the game; the graphics, the music, and the story are all beautifully executed and lovely to immerse oneself in for a few hours.

That said, I've a bit of an ocd tendency in games, and I'm finding myself frustrated with digging trenches. I did a search here and saw a dev response to a demo player suggesting there is a tool in the full game that makes digging large trenches easier, as well as spade upgrades that help.

Is the tool mentioned simply using the 'Q' key for levelling the sand? That does help, a bit, but I just spent thirty irl minutes trying to dig a nice little trench of uniform depth and width . . . and managed in all that time to get an extremely shallow puddle that was about eight feet long, if that.

Is there a tool other than the spade and using 'Q'? If not, how far into the game does one need to get in order to upgrade the spade? Alternatively, if anyone has some tips on trench digging, I'd love to hear them.

Cheers.

[Flyingbox]

There is a boss-locked tool that makes digging lines significantly easier. The alternate mode of it lets you draw a polygon point by point until you 'close' the shape by clicking back on the first point and then it raises the terrain.

Don't do it within a few feet of your plants though--each bump it raises or lowers will do massive damage. For certain rocks in the terrain though.....

TLDR: Tool makes digging/raising better.
2 points/line to dig. X points to make a polygon for raising. Special ability is a held/tap AoE that hits anything not-you in range and can mess with terrain a bit.

[Andramal]

I will say that the tool is not exactly precise either, so you will still end up doing fine tuning if you like the little details, BUT as far as large scale stuff goes, the tool helps considerably.

[thelefthorse]

Ok, good to know. Thanks to both of you.

How far into the game is this boss?

[Riven]

I haven't gotten anything beyond the flint spade. But I find it's a lot more easy and fun to work with the landscape and merely guide the water to natural features you want to accentuate. Makes it unique to a location and generally saves labor.

I noticed that if you really dig a lot in one area and create too many "updates" to what the terrain mesh is supposed to be doing it can get really ragged and glitched out looking, especially when you hit the "tile border" the game uses when generating terrain. I generally crank up my springs/stones a much as I can and go find something else to do for a bit. When I come back the ground will have hydrated and smoothed out, as well as creating overflow spots to either incorporate into the build or shore up to retain water better.

When it comes to smoothing and making nice trenches you kinda get a feel for it. I dig about 2 shovels wide and about 2-3 deep. I don't like the erosion/slope marks so I smooth those out as best I can by stepping about 1/2 a shovel's width away from the trench, dig once or twice and smooth twice. For really smooth surfaces always smooth twice, the smoothing tool kind of averages the overall height gradient of the shovel area, so smoothing twice really helps even it out. When trying to level areas, start from your ideal height and "pull" it in the direction you want to level 1/2 shovel at a time.

Hope it helps!

[Allorno]

Hey thelefthorse, I ran into a similar problem where I got pretty far into developing my oasis before getting the divine tool in question. "How far in is it?" really depends on how lost you get along the way. I can point you in the right direction if you want, I'll spoiler the paragraph below to give you a barebones guide to rushing it.

Once you help Naia (the first god/goddess) you're suggested to pursue helping either Stryge or Gleb. Assuming all player worlds (at least the first ones) are the same, Stryge is in the salt flats to the west of your oasis and Gleb is north in the city/mountainous area. Gleb gives you the terraforming tool you want. To get it you'll need to speak to 3 gate guards (on top of gate landmarks that show up on your map) and get them gears to repair the gates and open them to clear out the poisonous miasma/unlock the door to Gleb (where you'll then need to do 3 increasingly tough waves of enemies). The gears are in the same region, generally in (IIRC) 3 big honking towers (you'll know you have the right one if there's elevators up/down in the middle of them from the "ground floor" to the "basement". The poisonous miasma won't kill you quickly, but it'll get you eventually, and dehydration is also a major issue, so getting Naia to make you purifying droplets will give you an item that cures poison while giving you water back, and can be used to purify corrupted springs (requiring a tech unlock?) in the region (letting you refill your bottle without teleporting back). Also probably bring acorns/wood so you can fix teleport gates and go home to restock as necessary. One gate
also takes a worker bee (which you can find at the towers you find the gears at). They apparently can be deployed at the BOTTOM of the gates, not the top of them so uh... don't waste time climbing the wall with the debuff like myself and other players have.

Assuming you already have Naia done you can probably do it in a 2-4 hours? Stryge gives you a/an flight ability which really helps navigating the area, but I explored it mostly without it since I couldn't figure out how to get into her temple initially. Once I knew what I was doing I was able to finish the region in about an hour, but I'd already largely explored it, repaired teleport gates, and found the requisite items while lost about what to do, so it was just a case of dropping off items where they needed to go and doing the "boss fight".

[thelefthorse]

Thank you so much Flyingbox, Riven and Allorno. All this information is great.

And thanks for putting your clue in spoilers, Allorno. I peeked at just the first sentence and realized I'm not quite there yet, so I've left it unread until I find myself stuck. I really appreciate you taking the time to spoiler-proof it.

Sounds like I need to just keep exploring and digging and things will improve with practice and progression. Cheers.