New Tool Suggestion - Block Swapper

Refinement of a prior suggestion that’s gotten positive response in-game, but not as much attention on the forums.

Swapper - looks like a giant wrench maybe? Comes in Titanium and Gem variants
If a block supports different texture orientations, using the swapper on it will incrementally swap the block through its available textures.

Note that this does NOT alter chisel structure or anything else - JUST the texture orientation. It’s already a per-block field visible in debug settings - this tool will jsut give us the ability to control it after a block has already been placed. Intended uses range from making art with rotated textures to ensuring roads/walls all face the same way.

The Swapper should be able to be forged with standard options like Longevity, Energy use, Action speed, AoE. I also want to see the Swapper able to receive the Transform option! For a few reasons:

  • Chisels cannot be AoE because chiseling depends on how you hit a specific block. Since the Swapper would not depend on that and it can safely be AoE, this could be an AoE transform tool!
  • Removing an existing chisel boon opens the space for more/different chisel boons that actually deal with altering block shape.

Both of the above changes should hopefully be doable without significant code alteration - it’d make a tool able to change an existing data field (texture orientation), and it’d open the door for an AoE transform tool which has been a recurring request.

The final feature I’d love to see for the Block Swapper would be forge boon called “Replace”. A ‘Replace’ swapper would accept a single stack (not smart stack) of any block as an ‘augment’, and when striking a block it would do the following:

  • Consume one block from the ‘augment’ stack
  • Transform the target block into the block type of the augment stack - preserving the target block’s chisel structure
  • Drop the original block type that the target block had been

In effect, this will allow you to change what a build is made of WITHOUT having to tear down and replace and rechisel the whole thing. Practical applications range from redecorating walls/roads/builds - but another HUGE use would be restoring ‘ash’ builds left behind by reclaimed beacons. This would NOT prevent the original owner from keeping their blocks - reclaim would proceed as normal! But if a beloved build gets turned to ash, a ‘Replace’ swapper could be used to turn the ash forms back by just supplying the raw blocks. This would also benefit from the tool’s AoE application.

I know this l last application may well be the hardest to code - simply changing a target block’s block type is likely not hard, but dealing with treating a stack of blocks as an augment could be tricky. The alternative would be having the tool place the currently selected block from the OTHER hand, or some other way to specify the ‘source’ stack to use for replacement - but to my knowledge no other tool currently does this, so I think the ‘augment’ method is probably the easiest for devs to work with.

I’ve heard a lot of support for in-place texture rotation and AoE transformation tools, but in the past have run up against the problems that chisels cannot be AoE and that texture rotation shouldn’t be yet another chisel boon because chisels have too many already. By having this be a separate tool this would solve both issues.

Please let me know your thoughts on this!

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