Crossing Cliffs

General Discussion
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Hello all,

It’s been a while since I’ve been here. I was walking across Spain. Looks like much has been done in my absence and it all looks great. I’ve been catching up on the dev blog and here on the discourse. Playing the latest alpha and reading, has got me thinking about a subject not talked about in quite a while AFAIK.

I really love the art style in Stonehearth and the world generator creates beautiful landscapes. I understand the reasoning for stepped lands with cliffs for elevation changes. It’s great for the style and makes for large flat areas without minor elevation changes to deal with when building your town.

I understand there is supposed to be the ability to have your workers dig and build up land. Is there going to be an early game solution for traversing these cliffs? When I say early game, I mean something that will be available to you early in a game. As the alpha becomes more and more of an actual game it’s going to require some mechanism for traversing the cliffs if you want to venture beyond the plane of ground that you plant your flag on.

Some Ideas:

Ladders - Not my favorite solution but it would be simple enough to add an item to the carpenter workshop, and then have your workers place them on a cliff. Maybe they would be good for early exploration and expansion.

Digging - Not block by block editing of the ground but a special command similar to harvest where you indicate where you want the cliff breached. Your workers then dig and either collapse a section of it to make a ramp or actually dig out a ramp to the level above or below. It shouldn’t require micro managing. A simple a command, and a location, your workers take care of the rest.

Trails and Roads - Breaching the cliffs could be incorporated into trails and roads. Whenever a trail or road is placed crossing a cliff your workers automatically create a ramp. Maybe roads and trails would be built traversing the cliff (picture) instead of trying to breach them on a tangent. Either way there shouldn’t be any micro managing required, only where you want the road or trail.

Any or all 3 of these could be used. I’m sure the guys already have a plan. I wonder if it involves anything above. I think there still needs to be a way to do landscaping but it shouldn’t be required just to get access to get across cliffs. Just my thoughts.

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One way i can see it being done is by collapsing the cliff so that the area turns into a slope where we dont actualy remove anything, we just let the rubble from the slope create the lower half of the ramp. That way you would not have the trouble of gathering the leftovers as the leftovers would become part of the end-structure.

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i believe @sdee mentioned (a few months ago) that someone on the team was working on a potential use of the existing scaffolding system for this purpose?

i do like your suggestions though, specifically the “digging” concept…

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This seems like a good idea. I also recall @sdee saying that this could be implemented so that scaffolding would be more useful.

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Like I said:

Scaffolding would seem to be easy to implement, but ladders would be more elegant, and shouldn’t be too difficult to implement.

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