I agree with that too. Maybe we can have only one chisel just like we have now, but, just like the slingbow, it may have a crystal slot, where you could put a red or green crystal that would change the cut mode to Square and/or Bevel.
To simplify the things for the builders, these crystals could have infinite durability, so you just have to craft them once.
ohh, and what a Weekly Update! 
It took a while to read this much!
Oh, and this double herringbone pattern;
I’d love to get this in Clay Brick form too, as it’s a very popular flooring pattern. Regular herringbone would be nice too.
I am excited for so much of this, but I’m torn between being most excited for the chisels and the wood block progressions. I love working with wood in my builds so it was sort of sad that timber was the highest, so I’m super looking forward to seeing the refined and decorative block versions. Would there also be something like the brick progression?
Account names should be unique, and maybe character names don’t have to be. Then when you friend a character you can also see the account name? Or perhaps displayed below the name if you toggled them or turned that on in options. Showing character names in the forums depends on how many characters you will allow, but they can also just appear on the profile page, with their main being able to be selected to appear next to the account name like the badges are? As for the deleting a character, it depends…I’m assuming that you will not allow people to put more than 1 of their characters per beacon (to prevent people from being a village of one [that is, so they don’t have a crafting character, an exploring character, a mining character and a market character all on the same beacon…where’s the MMO in that?]) but since you can still have another person’s character on a beacon perhaps it should devolve to the villagers, if any, when the character is deleted. Otherwise it goes wild.
Counter-question, does this mean that we will no longer receive walls and slabs from trees? If they are no longer in the natural world, does this mean the tree shapes will become blockier? While harvesting raw slabs and walls from trees was sort of useless, it did add wonderfully natural looking trees that I have always appreciated.
I will return to answer the chisel questions later.
Should we add a basic Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time - so easy to make steps, walls and slabs) and a precision Square Chisel (which removed 1 corner at a time)?
Or should we add a single Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time), and allow players to learn a “Precision Chiseling Skill”. Which would upgrade their basic chiseling skill to be equivalent to the precision Square Chisel. This would make Building more skill based.
Does anyone have a better names than Slope Chisel, Square Chisel and Bevel Chisel?
Havent really thought a lot about this but I would prefer this to be a skill for the builders tree and since the advanced chisels (if it ends up being a builders skill) would be only for builder experts it could be “Builders Chisel” or “Builders Hammer”? haha not the most creative name I know but its the 1st thing I can think off xD. I’ll come back if I can think of something more profound
Should Character names be unique? Or can many players create characters with the same name?
Character names should be unique. It would be very hard to distinguish between you being ‘James’ and me being ‘James’ as well. Displaying the username in combination with the character name could be a workaround, but I’m not a fan of that (see 2.)
When you see a Character in the game, should we also display the user name?
I suspect to see the Character name only. Displaying the health bar, the character name and the username (and maybe even the guild name in the furute) would take a lot of screen space. Especially when there are multiple players around.
Should we show Character names in the forum?
Could have, and even then there are multiple ways to implement this:
Option A - Fully integrated with the game system, so that it is always up-to-date. A possible con is that test characters would show up as well.
Option B - Give users a profile field where they can manually enter their character names.
Option C - No integration at all.
I think option B is good enough for now.
When a player deletes a Character what do you expect should happen to their beacons in the game?
If there is no option to revert the deleation I see a few ways to handle that situation:
Option A - Do nothing, the beacon keeps running on the fuel in there and players on that beacon can refuel.
Option B - Same as option A, but players can not add fuel so the beacon will expire after some time.
Option C - Beacon gets transferred to the highest prestige builder in the beacon. There will be an issue with claim blocks I guess.
Option D - Instant delete the plots and beacon, everything in there will be at risk being regenerated or claimed by other players.
Option D seems a no-go for me. I think option A or B is the best option without that much coding impact. Option C will get quite complex quickly.
Other suggestions about multiple characters:
Should we add a basic Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time - so easy to make steps, walls and slabs) and a precision Square Chisel (which removed 1 corner at a time)?
Well this all seems to get quite complex quickly. The 1 versus 2 corners at a time is quite hard to explain to players. There would also be to many kind of chisels (slope single, slope two, square single, square two, bevel single, bevel two).
Or should we add a single Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time), and allow players to learn a “Precision Chiseling Skill”. Which would upgrade their basic chiseling skill to be equivalent to the precision Square Chisel. This would make Building more skill based.
Or… the other way around and let the first chisel skill be that you have to chisel each corner manually and a more advanced ‘speed chiseler’ skill allow to option to do two corners at once. I think a single skill would be enough though, since you already need a skill to create a chisel in the first place.
Does anyone have a better names than Slope Chisel, Square Chisel and Bevel Chisel?
Not really, but the options @Pseudonym84 suggests are good as well (corner, edge, angle chisel). I have a different chisel mechanism in mind, see below.
Other suggestions about chisels:
@Nibuls offers an option to visualize the chiseling operation:
I think it is a nice option, but it might get hard when using the chisel on a longer range (especially with range improvement skills applied). Maybe combine it with my suggestion above: preview the destination chisel shape when hovering your mouse cursor over the block to chisel.
Good to see these improvements being made, not every one has a blazing fast low latency network connection available. I think the game should be well playable with just a couple of megabits available like on some DSL networks (4 down / 0.5 up). This should also allow family to play together without needing insane amounts of bandwidth 
It would be great the debug screen would be easier to read. It contains way to many text now. Maybe we could swap to different debug screens by pressing TAB or something. Then you can get a simple debug with coordinates and world coordinates on the first, meshing and rendering stuff on the second, network and I/O on the third, etc.
I think the minimap is to better use than a very full compas. Maybe we can split what is rendered on where:
Compass: Players, Mobs
Minimap: City’s, plots, friendly players
There seems to be a fish-eye lens on that minimap, I prefer to have it flat (and maybe square but that is my personal opinion). I think there should be a zoom option or full screen option as well to see more details but not that much more in range.
@james: Maybe you can find the time to answer some questions (here). It would be nice to know what we can expect from B< except building.
I’ll go ahead and answer all those questions to provide my opinion for the discussion.
Character Questions:
Q: Should Character names be unique? Or can many players create characters with the same name?
A: Having played Elder Scrolls Online, a game in which all character names are unique (and there are also many restrictions on character names, such as use of space, punctuation, explicit words, etc.), I would prefer that characters in Boundless can share names.
This would mean that any account can use a specific name for a character, and any other account could use that name as well.
This could obviously have problems with people mistaking someone for a different person, but I have a few solutions to this. The second solution is in the answer to the next question, but the first solution is that: the developers, and users belonging to a higher tier (wayfarer and up) should have exclusive rights to reserve appropriate character names, so that no other users can take that name.
Q: When you see a Character in the game, should we also display the user name?
A: Yes, this is my first solution to the unique names dilemma. Additionally, it would help differentiate users, display more essential information, and make it easier for users to identify friends and acquaintances.
Q: Should we show Character names in the forum?
A: Showing character names on the forum should be optional. If a user desires to display a specific character of theirs on the forum, they should be able to choose that character from their list of characters (much like the drop-down list for badges). This could be displayed either next to the user name/badge area, or somewhere on the user card when the username is clicked on.
Q: When a player deletes a Character what do you expect should happen to their beacons in the game?
A: (This is all assuming whomever the beacon is transferred to possesses enough plots) In the event that a character is deleted, the owner of that character should be given a few options as to where their beacons go.
First option, they should be able to transfer the beacons/plots to any of their other characters. Second option, they should be able to transfer the beacons/plots to anyone’s characters on their friends list. Third option, allowing the transfer of beacons/plots to anyone else who is a contributor/part of that beacon/plot. Last option, to abandon that beacon/plot entirely and let anyone claim it or let the world regenerate the area.
Chisel Questions:
Q: Should we add a basic Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time - so easy to make steps, walls and slabs) and a precision Square Chisel (which removed 1 corner at a time)? Or should we add a single Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time), and allow players to learn a “Precision Chiseling Skill”. Which would upgrade their basic chiseling skill to be equivalent to the precision Square Chisel. This would make Building more skill based.
A: My personal solution to the chisel problem might seem a bit complicated at first, but it simplifies the excess of options required (more chisels, more skills, etc.).
What I propose is that there is a single chisel tool that anybody can craft at the earliest stage of tool crafting (Higher tiers blocks would require higher materials/tiers of chisels obviously).
When in the left hand, a left click on a block would remove a single space from the block, and holding down the left click on that space would restore it (This would have to be refined, however, to allow for the limited block shapes). When in the right hand, a right click on a block would remove that space and create a slope on that block, and holding down the right click would restore that slope to its previous state.
I’m not sure how this system could accommodate for the possibility of beveled blocks (personally, I don’t think the system is needed, as the building system presently in the game is at the perfect level of complexity to allow for amazing builds). My idea for the chisel system could be flawed, then, but I would love to hear what others think.
Q: Does anyone have a better names than Slope Chisel, Square Chisel and Bevel Chisel?
A: I think that those names are simple and effective to quickly understand their purpose, so no changes are needed, IMO, though @Pseudonym84 had some good suggestions. If need be, one could always right click the item in their inventory to receive a detailed description as to how the chisels are used.
P.S.
I added the pictures of the natural props, the lustrous refined floor, the bag of bombs, and the chisel system diagrams to the archive.
Thanks for reading through all this if you did!
Congrats, Matt! You earned that 
When James said not generate, he meant as part of the terrain like slopes do. Prefabs, including trees continue ti have whatever shapes, just now when you breeak a part of a tree that is a ‘step’ you just get ‘wood’ instead of ‘wooden step’ in your inventory.
Big important question. Will glass be able to be ramped? Or even just crafted into Ramps instead of chiselled. I just really really want glass Ramps
It “has” been put on the list of craftable/slopeable blocks to add. But from a technical perspective, right now it would not work very well visually, as the glass has no “volume” to it other than edges of the texture, so if ramped/crafted into steps etc, most of it would just be entirely invisible without a lot of work done just for this one block…
My response to that is simply :\
I understand it’s a lot of work it’d just be so cool…:\
You do you y’all it’s a good game and it’s getting better with hiccups.
I don’t see the value of adding an additional square chisel for removing two corners at the same time.
Instead I propose the following: detect whether the cursor is closer to a corner, or closer to the center of the edge. If it is closer to a corner, just remove that corner. If it is closer to the center of an edge, remove both corners attached to that edge.
This is more intuitive, doesn’t require an additional item, and doesn’t (questionably) lock it behind skill progression.
A visual highlight that indicates what part is about to be removed would go long ways to make it even more intuitive.
Intuitive, maybe, but I’d imagine it could also be quite frustrating to use if I am having to precisely aim my chisel at extremely specific parts of the block to get the cut I want, especially if I’m hanging from a grapple while I chisel. It’s not too difficult to hit the quarter of the face I want to hit while swinging, but divide that block up further into even more subdivisions - each giving a different cut - and I’m intuitively cursing like a mad drunken sailor. At least with various chisel options, the most frustrating thing becomes switching chisel types mid build, and I honestly only see that becoming a problem in complex high detail situations like making statues or art. Jobs that, arguably, would most frequently be done by dedicated builders any way. Why not give this uniquely refined ability to at least moderately dedicated builders! They certainly could do with more attributes that set them apart from their crafting, mining, and/or combat kin.
Yup. No way this is coming out this year
Thanks! That really helps clear it up for me. That also helps me understand the difference between pre-fabs and generation a lot more.
Better a long awaited finished product than a rushed out mess. I’ve lost count of the amount of games that have been released in unfinished states, and have failed precisely due to that reason.
In the meanwhile you’re free to play the beta Live or Testing branches, but I wouldn’t expect a release within the next 6 months.
Cant argue with that. However The way you dolve tgat problem is not tell ppl a game is hitting in 2016 (and now 17) and miss the target twice. Take a queue from Bethesda and dont even anmouce a game til its like 3 months from release. Cant anticipate something you didnt know about 1+ years in advanced right?
As for playing the beta. Id love to, as soon as they put it on ps4 ill get right on that
I feel like we’ve told you that the games release date got pushed back when the scope of the game was drastically expanded before, but you continue to choose to ignore this fact in favor of whining about the game not being released yet in spite of the fact that you agree that a game is better late and solid, than on time and unfinished. The mental disconnect is extremely puzzling to me.
The initial release prediction was exclusively for a pc release, not a simultaneous console release. You’re complaining about a broken promise that never existed.
A quick scan of your post history is basically this same complaint over and over again. Eventually you must start to ask yourself- why do you keep doing this? What do you think to accomplish? Because right now, it’s just annoying.
