On terraforming...

[Miguel Preguisa 443]

Today I left the game upset. For the second time of the whole year and a half. I must say that terraforming is a mechanic that I don't like in the Ylands. (Not even talking about the water)  At one time you think you can handle the terraforming pretty well and a minute later some little thing pop up and you are trying to get rid of it next few hours. And I mean that literally. My plan for today was to make some little dock and start building a ship, then maybe even visit some another Yland and finally find Ylandium. Instead, I spent my two last hours on terraforming one single strip of land. I was lowering my expectations every half hour to "Okay, I just need a straight line somewhere. No more deflection that two spaces of the grid so I can mask it with the big bricks." Of course, that didn't happen even when I cheated and added myself the Terraformer. I'm still not sure how to make it look better...  These are the two biggest problems as I see it:

This little lower segment in a terrain. You can't effectively flatten it, it either doesn't respond at all or it makes a bigger chunk of dirt on its side. And if you add a little dirt on it and then try to flatten it, it will just simply reappear. The only way how to get rid of this I know is to dig the whole place down and rebuild it again.

This is more a bug but it's really often (mostly around that lower segments) and it makes terraforming harder and more irritating. Its a hole to "void" and if you step on this you will get stuck.

 

And to end this not so negative, I must say that there is a minimum of pieces of dirt floating in the air as I remember from my last Explore world. Which is really great! 

 

[Gracekain 86]

Terraforming gets on my nerves also.  I hate that sometimes your shovel seems to work fine then it just stops working.  I find that if I move around a lot when terraforming it seems to help.

[bigblockhead 17]

Amen to this- I raided my beaches near spawn for sand early on- they will never look the same.

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. We're very much aware that terraforming is far from perfect and we plan on improving it until it is (or at least until it's close enough). The problem is that there is no "perfect fix" that would work for every single situation. Instead, we keep fixing specific situations and corner cases (many times other factors than just terraforming itself is causing the problem). So to improve this as soon as possible we need as much help from you as we can get

Whenever something doesn't behave the way you expect it to - tells us right away. Don't spend a long time trying to find a workaround for something that we should be fixing. Post it here, let us worry about that and in the meantime try doing something else :).

Here's how you could help us with this - whenever you encounter place where terraforming doesn't work as expected, please capture a picture (or even a video!), post it here (or anywhere on the forum) along with a description and please attach your game as well because most of the times just looking at the picture doesn't give us enough info to understand what causes the problem.

We are extremely grateful for any kind of feedback from you - especially whenever something in the game makes you upset... So thanks, Michal!