Terrain tool is bloody awful

Farthest Frontier Ideas and Feedback
1

I know this has been said a million times, but I’m here now to register my absolute frustration and misery with this tool.

I love Alpine maps. This means that I’m often building on rugged and uneven terrain. No problem - I’ll use the game’s terrain tool to create as close to flat surfaces (I can accept some curve) as I can for buildings. Nope! This is apparently not possible. My entire town is a higgledy-piggledy mess of tilted buildings that REFUSE, as if by some evil mandate, to be straightened.

I’ve spent years in-game attempting to flatten the edge of a plateau so that buildings at the top are flat, and a road then curves downward in a gentle terrace effect to buildings at a lower altitude that are at present, wonky and tilted. For whatever reason, the tool refuses to allow me to create a flat surface at the edge where the plateau begins to curve downward. I’ve tried all the tips and tricks I’ve read about online and NOTHING works. I’ll select ten mostly flat tiles with ONE tile that is lower than the others, thinking that surely that one tile will be raised to match the average of the others, but no… for some reason, it drags the whole damn edge down, creating dips and holes that I am trying to avoid.

It’s infuriating in the extreme and seriously impacting my enjoyment of the game. I’m not trying to create a mountain citadel here, I’m just trying to make reasonable edges and curves for a slightly terraced effect on an already bumpy map. What’s the point of this tool if we can’t use to craft the terrain for basic landscaping? Even in the middle ages, humans were smarter than this and knew how to place buildings to be flat on hills.

Please do something about this tool post-release!

edit: You have got to be kidding me…! I searched around and apparently there’s a bug that locks terrain with fences on them to whatever height they were when you built the fences. Well, I had fences built. Deleted them and finally the terrain shifted to match the rest of the flattened land, instead of being dragged down like the fenced tiles were. Absolutely ridiculous and can’t believe I wasted hours of my time trying to fix something that couldn’t be fixed on account of a stupid bug.

6 Likes
2

They need to base the vertical axis of buildings off the base of the map, not the surface of the terrain it is built on.

Create some sort of foundation in the building that extends however far it needs to in order to remain plumb, the Terrain Tool only capable of affecting the final height of a building, and not angle at which it protrudes from the map.

The Terrain Tool itself is a diminishing-returns effort, in that the more you work a piece of terrain, the less the tool does, and because of that it never reaches a state of zero, or flat and level.

Less than optimal, to be sure.

They have claimed to have fixed it before, but to no effect.

1 Like
3

I agree with this, even on a non alpine map, trying to level the ground just a bit is such a pain in the behind…I have a slope within my town radius and I literally not get the area to match the rest of the town no matter how many times I try and level it…it seems like I level 1 part and it raises the next…

1 Like
4

I agree here and already made a long rant elsewhere. The “flatten terrain” tool does everything BUT actually flatten the terrain, and it makes the buildings an eyesore. I can’t play the game without a modded terrain tool.