How to get a flat ground

[xocorret]

Hi there,
I want to have a flat piece of ground to do my farming on, but it seems an impossible task to do so. Whenever I put or remove some dirt with the shovel it is always to much in the one place and to few in the other.

The same problem occurs when I want to have a smooth transition from a grid to the surrounding environment, which makes building basements a real chore.

Does anybody know a trick how to obtain a nice smooth dirt surface?


PS: Survival mode preferred. Yes I could switch to creative and use the voxel hands, but they feel wonky as well.

[Dan2D3D]

The best, for me, is that I always find a flat area to avoid this kind of problems.

OR

Use the shovel with the terrain tools (rope spikes) hehe not sure about the name cause I never use ;)

[xocorret]

Aaah, there are landscaping stakes. I haven't seen them, since I have not yet researched weaving. Thanks, this is what I look for.

[Wembley]

It is a joke flattening area's, what I tried and it worked to a degree is to put "Big Boy" blocks down (round squares), really into the soil.. don't build them leave then as wooden structures.. then get on top and place your stakes and rope to make a cube... then destroy the blocks.. the rope and stakes will remain.. then look to drop soil into the "white areas", it is hit and miss and you need to look for the sweet spot...

Ideally it should be that we use the stakes and rope but we have soil in the inv and drop it ... other games do this (Life is Feudal for example)

Even with the block method I get warnings about putting soil on myself and I can't put soil above my head.. this to me is the weakest part of the game

However there is grace in these troubled times.. Follow Toshba47... really good at ME

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYvAOp66Vdk4dBZXMfKBdeA

[WhoManBean]

This is a difficult task to be sure. I tend to use a combination of the methods both Dan2D3D and Wembley pointed out...

I have found it most useful to know holding the SHIFT key while digging and filling with the shovel does two specific things. First it moves more material... Second it bypasses the plane of the landscaping spikes.

Specifically, I place the stakes level with one another in a method similar to the suggestion above...usually using a timber frame or large block section. I then fill above the plane provided by the landscapping spikes, using the SHIFT RMB and release the SHIFT key to dig down to the plane.

NOTE TO KEEN: It would be a wonderfully simple addition to this game to implement a CTRL shovel to move less material. A CTRL key movement would be useful for Plow, Shovel and Pick alike by simply multiplying the amount of material by 0.5.

[DeadMechGaming]

You could always make a machine that doesn't require flat ground. My farmer can contort to any terrain it encounters by being able to spin on all axis. It also uses weights to pull itself down hills to make farming easier.

This is called medieval engineers for a reason.

[Xilo The Odd]

the landscaping stakes are very nice. took me a min to figure em out, and find em, in the dark...

I REFUSE TO MAKE HAND TORCHES!

[xocorret]

I played around a bit with these things and found that it is especially hard to do anything with the stakes if I want to fill in besides existing walls. However I have an idea how to improve this, which I will put in the suggestion thread.

[Wembley]

I would love that the introduced a Life is Feudal approach.. which is simplistic and easy.. it uses a grid based system. so you can see the level of each block.. you flatten a block then work out... and flatten blocks around it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFV2J7KIiPw
Removes spikes... ropes.. etc and makes it real easy to flatten ground.. I must have spent more time on this game flattening land than I did on LiF.. and LIF is a grind.

[xocorret]

I kindly disagree on the intuition that LiF has completely different core mechanics and thus naturally a different way to implement things. Since rewriting even a tiny bit of code can be a real hassle sometimes, my suggestion went with something that uses already in-place mechanics.

This is not to say that other ways are inferiour, but these are other games with very different inner workings.

[Zentaki]

The solution is so simple.
Need just to implement flattening actions with the shovel holding ctrl and clicking with right or left mouse.
Even better, i guess there is no third action for shovel. So why not the game uses what already is ready to be used? the game has 3 main action and are assigned to the 3 mouse buttons.
Need just to make the third action, mouse wheel click, to make terrain flat.

Now, into the game there is a video right? there you can see someone playing the game in creative mode using the voxel hand to easily flat the ground. But when you try to do it yourself it seems that devs just removed the feature from the game.

And so comes a thought, how stupid is not to have a flattening system in the game, and i mean in the survival. Because its logical to be able to flat the ground with a shovel.

All the devs must do it to set up an area of influence which will flat the ground in rays, making like a circle type of shape. So player would point to the ground and the game would do the calculations to flat that point. Super easy.

And for a game with such construction power as this to not have a way to flat the ground is a big joke.

[Dan2D3D]

@Zentaki

2017 is too old to post in cause the game is not the same anymore, please create a new discussion when too old.