Inspired by Darvin’s bridge... https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3349373613 ... as well as my own ungodly experimentation with what constitutes level ground for stockpile placement in the game’s eyes... https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3345651698 ... I have been looking for ways to reshape the world with the least amount of time and effort.

Now let’s be clear, the wooden shovel sucks and you will need to arm yourself with patience to do any of this, but this being a survival game, I’m sure some of you are up to the task. I only have so much patience for menial work in video games, so my goal is to find shortcuts to decent solutions, not make impressive mega-constructions like you see in Minecraft. I have no doubt that you can take these ideas and run farther with them than I could ever be bothered to try.

A lot of places allow you to dig through (and collect) dirt, mud or sand. There are also patches of solid "ground" or "rock" that the shovel doesn’t interact with. These are also exposed by digging deep enough through other materials.

You can dig or dump dirt to change the ground’s height and level things up to some extent, but it’s slow, tedious work that still results in uneven ground more often than not. The "smooth ground" action on the shovel really doesn’t accomplish much. Fortunately, buildable floors require level ground and provide a much more effective way to achieve it.

Building a floor comes in three steps: 1) defining the shape by placing four anchors, 2) leveling the ground with a shovel, and 3) putting in the materials to do the actual building. Step two is the crux of a lot of this guide, but we need to master step one to really make our best work. We’ll be using the first two steps to avoid of lot of unnecessary digging, carrying and dumping of dirt. Actually finishing the floor will be optional and is mostly about aesthetics.

Note: In all cases, dirt and mud can be used interchangeably when following this guide. Sand, on the other hand, cannot be dumped to raise the ground – only stockpiled or discarded (destroyed).

Now the cool thing about "leveling" the ground for floors is that a single click will take care of a much larger area than digging/dumping/smoothing does, and doesn’t require any dirt. The terrain just rises or lowers on its own. And thus, the only prior work you need to put in is getting four points to the desired height before placing your floor anchors.

Let’s put that into practice!

Let’s start easy by getting rid of some water so we can travel faster between nearby islands, especially with a cart.




Note that you can’t just dump dirt into water: you always need to aim at the edge of exposed ground and expand from there. Sometimes that takes a lot of wiggling the mouse to hit the right spot.

Make your lines a little wider apart than you think you need, since the game won’t let you place an anchor in what it says is water, even if it’s actually just above water. If you want your floor to sit higher above the water, you can dump more dirt at your specific anchor points without having to raise the entire line.




Either type of floor works; I use stones since I find it easier to acquire and carry a large stone than a short plank. From a single stone, you can place several floor sections in a row. You’ll notice that the pointer "snaps" to existing corners when you hover near them, which helps avoid gaps.

Note that at this stage, the middle is still hollow, so keep that in mind if you don’t want to fall into deeper water.


At this point, it’s worth explaining how leveling works. First off, it’s a misnomer: it doesn’t make the ground level, it makes it flat. It calculates a flat plane between your four anchors and raises or lowers the ground until it matches that plane, but that can lead to all sorts of wacky angles. So when I mentioned mastering step one earlier, I was referring to this: making sure that all four anchors of each floor section are roughly level with each other, and preferably with other connecting floor sections, as well as sitting at the intended height.

For minor differences, dumping or digging a little may hide imperfections, but if you have OCD, you might be in for a bad time. Another thing that might help is leveling all floor sections, then removing them and laying down new sections overlapping where the original ones would join. By leveling these joins, you should get more progressive, less discernible angles when you finalize the real build.

Leveling also has a couple quirks to keep in mind:

1. The progress bar is not linear, it stops and starts seemingly at random. It may look like no progress is being made, but it will catch up with reality eventually. You might see the ground shift even though the progress bar doesn’t increase.
   
2. However, if your character isn’t quite close enough to the floor, he will perform the animation without actually interacting with the floor section. Check your stamina bar: if it isn’t depleting, no progress is being made.
   
3. Progress doesn’t happen vertically, but horizontally. In other words, you won’t see the whole section raise gradually, but get filled in (or emptied) from side to side. Depending on where you stand, you might get pushed around a bit as that happens.

So by now you’ve filled in a whole area of water without dumping nearly as much material as it would have taken normally. It’s fully walkable and buildable. Note that leveling the ground in shallow water raises sand rather than dirt, which slows down carts and wheelbarrows considerably. On the plus side, you might get infinite sand without digging holes everywhere.

For this example, I satisfied myself with a rough, uneven path I could lay a stone floor onto for quicker passage with a cart, and I wasn’t careful about keeping everything level.

And as a side note, you can use concave edges judiciously to avoid dumping any dirt at all, progressively expanding the existing bank by cutting corners through the water:

When it comes to rivers, the process is much the same but on a larger scale, and with a lot of inadvertently sliding off and getting carried away by the current. You need to dump a lot more dirt to progress forward, and sometimes the game gets annoying and raises one spot stubbornly instead of expanding in the direction you want. More pixel hunting ahead! Of course, you can always dig those mounds back down, it’s just annoying and time-consuming.

For this example, I worked from an existing single line of dirt I had made for another failed experiment:



You can see what I meant about some points being taller than others and the whole thing looking super jagged.

Instead of dumping a whole second line, I added "ribs" jutting out of either side of that central "spine" at regular intervals. I estimate that this would require a bit less dirt and time, but the difference likely isn’t major. You also need a decent estimate of how far each floor section can reach. By extension, that means you should decide ahead of time where exactly the floor begins on the bank! (Guess who had to redo the whole thing three times?) Sticking with the full two-line method will save you some of that planning and guessing.

I didn’t take any great screenshots of the build process here, but you’ll notice that the square part near the bank raised a fairly solid surface (some of which is undiggable "ground"). In deeper water, that doesn’t really happen anymore – the dirt you dumped gets flattened between your anchors, but the actual surface area barely increases and has jagged edges like the ones in front of my character. Because of this, making a simple dirt path isn’t going to look good if you don’t actually dump two full lines of dirt (which I didn’t test, so it might still leave gaps you would need to fill in like that hole near the bottom of the screenshot). For actual floors, though, this definitely saves you a bunch of work since all that truly matters is your four corners.

Here is the end result, complete with a stone floor at one end to cover the sand my cart would get bogged down by, and a teaser of the next section in the foreground:



Note that you can change the orientation of plank floors with Left Shift + Mouse Wheel. It doesn’t always seem to work, but I suspect you have to "scroll" far enough for a full 90-degree rotation even though it doesn’t react visually until reaching that threshold, unlike stockpiles which rotate every step of the way.

So this is cool, we can now cross water and bring our war machines carts to distant shores. But what if that new land isn’t up to our standards? Raze it!

Going back to the previous screenshot, you can see a dirt path leading to the bridge. Though not obvious from this angle, you can tell from the shadows that this path cuts through a hillock, as I wanted a more progressive slope for my cart to climb easily. Did I dig all that dirt out? Hell no!

I laid down a floor section starting from the corners of the bridge and going up, and "leveled" it. Now remember, this doesn’t actually level the ground, but makes a flat plane between the anchors. Because I was working along the side of a slope, my first floor was also at an incline. I had to clear several overlapping sections, interrupting the process when the higher part had gone down but before the lower part was raised. Eventually it leveled out nicely.

The key is to position your anchors at the best height to cut through the unwanted ground. Due to size limitations, sometimes that will mean shaving off the top part of a small section, then working progressively off the sides to smooth the angles by bringing the average height down step by step. In maybe 5 minutes and more waiting than clicking, I had a perfectly even path wide enough for a cart, without having to dig up or dump a single gram of dirt inch by inch.

And of course, you can raise ground in much the same way. A lot of people are annoyed by boulders blocking construction around their camps. By raising four points of dumped dirt around a boulder, you can place a floor on top, level the ground up and cover it completely. Then place other floors around it to create a gentle slope on all sides and integrate it better with its surroundings.

Resolute took this idea to the extreme and placed his entire house on raised ground:
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350026876

Can you use the above techniques to "level ground" your way out of a cave’s pit? No. In fact, the game won’t even let you dump dirt there – something about protected habitats or some such nonsense the druids came up with after sampling the local mushrooms. Our trusty shovel is just dead weight here. But all is not lost!

In caves, you can just build floors at basically any angle, and no leveling is ever required. That can be useful to deal with sudden drop-offs, but it means you need to have the actual materials to build ramps. Fortunately, caves happen to be a good place to find large stones, so you don’t need to lug a backpack full of them into every cavern. A half-dozen going in is a good start.

Just lay down a floor over a chasm – keep it narrow to save on stones – and build it from your side to traverse or slide down safely. Here, distance is your greatest enemy, since you can’t progressively inch forward using dirt. But if you intend to come out eventually, you also need to build your bridge at a walkable angle.



Or do you? The above example is a little too steep for our guy, and floors don’t prompt the "climb" action. But as we’ve seen previously, the game tends to lie about some details. For instance, stockpiles don’t care about "flat ground" as much as they claim. Any floor is good enough for them, regardless of angle. Doesn’t even have to be wide enough to fit their full surface area. And stockpiles are climbable and very modular:



That’s a lot of stones, though. This whole section of floor, then another 12 stones for a full layer of stockpiled stones (of course, if you came with a pickaxe, a stockpile of ores is also an option), to deal with just one drop? Well, the other good thing about stockpiles is that they also don’t care about gravity. What happens if you remove the floor from under them? Well, nothing. Stockpiles never let you down:



So as long as you still have 1 stone to start a stockpile with, you can get rid of the floor and regain a whole bunch of stones to keep working with. Fill that stockpile up to 12 (hell, 10 will probably do) and now you can climb the whole length of it. At that point, we’re close enough to the ledge that we can grab onto it. That’s roughly 1.5 times our character’s height that I was able to descend safely, sliding along the floor, and then climb back up using just 12 large stones.

Here is a video of this method in action with better lighting:
https://i.imgur.com/Y2JiKpl.mp4

Heads up! Climbing up a vertical stockpile isn’t feasible either. You still need it at a reasonably shallow angle to climb to the middle and then up to the top. If it’s not letting you climb from any of its sides, start over with a different floor. I got it on my first try, but then failed a bunch of times in roughly the same spot. Remember that there’s always a possibility you won’t be able to come out of a cave, and always save going in.