Terraforming Tool?

So, tonight I made my first earnest effort to start tinkering around in Creative Mode, and I almost immediately got to thinking…

There are plenty of builds in the live universe that incorporate natural features, but there are also ones that I think could benefit from it where it’s not available, or where they could accomplish more if there was a less exhausting way to sculpt the terrain than to shovel it all out by hand and then smooth it over again. And as I was standing there on a lonely, endless expanse of flat dirt, I wondered…

Could we get some kind of tool(s) for filling/clearing/smoothing terrain?

Here’s how I’d like the filling part to work… I know the world gen tends to put a thin-ish layer of dirt over the native rocks, but for simplicity’s sake I’d be happy to have a filling tool that just piled in dirt. If we could do rock too? Fantastic! But I’d be OK with dirt.

As far as smoothing, the effect could be similar to an AOE chisel but with its stated purpose in mind rather than the goal of producing a specific type of angle.

And I know that this forum is great at naysaying every idea almost to death, so:

  1. The clearing tool would not harvest any of the materials in its AOE, just eliminate them

  2. The tools’ effects could be confined to beaconed areas to prevent mass trolling via “improvised creative landscaping”

  3. Dirt farmers could have 30 days’ notice before the release of these new tools, so they could learn how to code instead

1 Like

BUMP

Nooobody has any thoughts for or against this? Or did we just get lost in the shuffle here?

Um you playing on test server?

We have a ful set of terrain tools already,
They are called World Builder.
If I only know to use them in Creative Mode…
I would be golden :grinning::+1:
PS I’m not a scripter

I don’t understand what exactly would the tool do, you define an area and it fills it with block X? Or clears it?

Not really playing anywhere but Creative right now, but I’d like to see some easier way to sculpt terrain in Live.

Or, I’d prefer something more like a brush effect that I’ve seen in some other building games, where you could could set the size and shape of the brush and then guide it with your cursor.

As an example… Let’s say I was underground and I wanted to build a cave. Yes, I can always throw bombs forward and downward, but the aiming isn’t very precise and I can’t aim upward - only start high and work my way down if I have to. If I had something like a wand effect, it would be really really really easy to create more exact dimensions. And if it had a smoothing tool, it would be really really really easy to make the resulting cave look natural without having to calculate the chisel angle of every single block.

A smoothing tool would be uber helpful.

2 Likes

Judging by the deluge of positive feedback here, let’s assume that this… will never see the light of day.

I mean it’d be nice, yes, but the amount of effort required to make the tool behave correctly seems massive.

Nahhh, it’s actually not that complicated. The filling/clearing is very straightforward - just set a shape or a radius and walk with the cursor where you want the magic to happen. And the smoothing technique would use the same math as world gen does when it’s making a landscape, only on an infinitely smaller scale.

To name a couple of games where I’ve already seen these tools in action, Lego Worlds has been around for several years now and has a brush tool that does this. Also, the ill-fated EverQuest Landmark (glad I refunded before it imploded…) was able to sculpt voxels with much more intricate detail than we see here. They just couldn’t… seem to… manage the other 80% of their game.