A18 Wrong terrain or what the hell am I doing wrong?

[carlos_ar]

Hey Survivors!

 

So we made a base in a forest biome and we are trying to levcel the ground.  It seems when we put a terrain block down it is never what we actually place but it only takes the texture of what we removed.

 

We remove a dirt block, put down a forest block it looks like dirt.  Pile it up and it just looks like dirt.  Same with sand, and asphalt.  The block we put down will always just look like what is down already. So we cant landscape a yard or add a road.  I know in all previous versions we always did this but it just doesnt work here.  Why would TFP change this?  or am I doing something wrong??

 

Also noticed that the surface level of the terrain isnt  something you can change.  It looks like a spot has like a block and a half height.  Dig down 1 block so all the area is level.  That one spot, you put 1 block of dirt and its 1 and a half high again.  So unless you manually flatten an area you have to have the terrain generated and you cant change it.

 

 

 

 

Thought maybe it was because we were at a POI so I went to the middle of nowhere and tried to lay asphalt.  Lay asphalt it ended up looking like stone, dirt, and grass, just depending on where I laid it.  Break it and I get stone or clay back depedning what the terrain looked like.

 

Anyone know if this is fixed in a19??  Or is this just how it's going to be now?  

[carlos_ar]

So... you can craft asphalt but why the hell would you if it doesnt LOOK like roadways when you put it down?  It doesnt even have the durability it SHOULD have as asphalt.  It just takes on whatever terrain property it looks like when you place it down.

[Boidster]

You are not doing anything wrong. This is a known issue with asphalt.

[carlos_ar]

Thanks!  But it seems to be every terrain block I place just seems to be predetermined no matter what block it is.  I can place a forest ground block, looks like dirt, place a stone block in the same place, also looks like dirt.  It's as if what belongs there is predetermined, and no matter what terrain block you put there it just changes to that predetermined block.   Very frustrating

[Synvastian]

its adaptive top layering, whatever is below the block you place, it attempts to replicate it (same with blocks to the side of it, sometimes it copies topsoil near the edge of roads, or gravel)

[JCrook1028]

17 hours ago, carlos_ar said:

So... you can craft asphalt but why the hell would you if it doesnt LOOK like roadways when you put it down?  It doesnt even have the durability it SHOULD have as asphalt.  It just takes on whatever terrain property it looks like when you place it down.

Wrong, it will LOOK like dirt but it will have the HP of asphalt.

[Dracula]

This has been an endless source of frustration for me for the last two alphas and is my single largest complaint about the game.

[theFlu]

The only way you can get the texture you want is to build either high or low enough, the re-texturing has a height limit. Yeah, that means a lot of digging, or filling, but depending on the build, it might work.

 

Figure out the limits by placing blocks on top of one another until you get the "proper" one.

[Dracula]

It's a moot point if you've created asphalt and want to fix a city road.  I don't want to level an entire city to make a driveway; I'm not a supervillain.  I don't have nearly good enough weapons.

[theFlu]

Sure, there are cases where it won't work.. if the RNG has made a terrible road and you want it look half decent, slap on some sheets and paint them to look like a concrete sidewalk or something that's not entirely horrible...

[Dracula]

Living with the rough corners of where the blocks don't mesh with the terrain has never sat right; apart from, say, a bridge.

 

I hope that it's fixed in a new update or I may go back to a previous alpha for a while.

[Boidster]

16 hours ago, Synvastian said:

its adaptive top layering, whatever is below the block you place, it attempts to replicate it (same with blocks to the side of it, sometimes it copies topsoil near the edge of roads, or gravel)

It's not quite that, I think. The game simply paints any terrain block the player places with the top-layer terrain texture which was there on the original map, no matter what is next to it.

 

In this picture, all of the terrain blocks are "forest ground", but regardless of height or surrounding blocks, they take on the texture of whatever was there originally - not copying the cement blocks.

 

 

As an extreme example, here is a "forest ground" terrain block placed on bedrock, beneath the road:

 

 

Yep, it's textured as asphalt.

4 hours ago, Dracula said:

This has been an endless source of frustration for me for the last two alphas and is my single largest complaint about the game.

Yeah I hope they fix this eventually. I enjoy terraforming around my base once I get settled. It's why I'm not real keen on Madmole's position that not all blocks need to be in the player's craftable list because (paraphrasing) "players wouldn't need those blocks". I enjoy building things in-game (during "survival" play, not just in the POI editor) and if I want to build a 1:1 replica of Trader Joel's then I oughta be able to, dangit.

 

"We don't have the developer resources to make all of those blocks available, at least not before we go Gold" - okay, fine, makes sense.

"Players would not need those blocks" - YOU'RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR! 😄

[theFlu]

4 minutes ago, Boidster said:

As an extreme example, here is a "forest ground" terrain block placed on bedrock, beneath the road:

 

Yep, it's textured as asphalt.

Woah.. now you're making me doubt myself. Is that A19, and did you test it in A18? I'm sure I was able to place stone-looking-stone above desert textures in A18, but that asphalt on concrete is higher than I remember it requiring.

[Boidster]

That was A19. I'll go check A18, jussa sec.

-----

Aaaaaand we're back. Dang A18 takes forever to load. Okay it looks like Stone is a special case (though I did not yet test all terrain blocks). Forest Ground and Asphalt both take on whatever the original surface texture was. Stone just looks like stone. I tested this in both A18 and A19.

 

Top blocks are Forest Ground, bottom blocks are Stone. This is on a concrete platform 4 blocks above the surface. I also tested beneath the surface and the same behavior holds true.

 

 

 

[Dracula]

Another interesting note is that it will change the terrain on the map to whatever you change it to.