So I was going to cut a pathway up a cliff side but it appears that we can only mine a 4x4x4 square, and occasionally a 4x4x5 (depending on where you’re mining). However, that seems to be the only options.
Are there plans to change the mining width/height of the mining area? Or am I missing some way to shrink the guideline?
It cannot be shrunk now, but it is a possible feature, I’m not sure if it has already been confirmed or not… It’s also possible that there will be a stair building tool, but for now, there are several things you can do in stead:
A). Build ladders.
B). Stack up slabs on top of each other to build stairs.
There are slabs?! Geez, I’ve been away too long! Thanks for the tip 
Edit: Aaah, you can make slabs in the building designer. I see!
You can pseudo-mine out stairs by building floors/roads and then canceling them after the mining finishes but before construction does.
I have had some problems after removing the buildings though, so it’s usually a good idea to make a backup save beforehand.
It struck me as disconcerting that all houses and doors up to this point have been built on an odd scale (i.e. doors are 3 blocks wide, prefab houses are 7 blocks wide, etc.) but that mining is set with an even scale (4 blocks wide). I’m always having to come up with some way of getting my 4 block road going to my mine to jive with my 3 block road that connects up all my houses, my fire pit, and everything else. My mind keeps asking why isn’t default mining (and double doors) either 3 blocks or 5 blocks wide so that it matches what seems to have been the natural scale up to this point?
wow… excellent question… and my OCD would concur! 
@honestabelink, @RepeatPan… please address this at your nearest convenience! 
I won’t. It’s a game design choice that I understand and support. Odd numbers wouldn’t work, the game is even in the core.
I loved it when double doors came out, because finally I had the option to make even doors that would line up with even windows, while still having the freedom to make odd doors. [Although no odd windows yet. We need 3 x 3 windows!
As far as mining size goes: The cliffs are ten blocks tall. Using a 4-tall mining tool allows you to make two seperate tunnels, without breaking through the floor of an upper tunnel, or through the next level of ground. I suppose it made sense to make it a cube in a world made of cubes.
My problem is that the walls are at least 6 blocks tall, and therefore don’t play nice with mines. So I really need a 2 x 2 x 2 tool, but a 1 x 1 x 1 tool would be more versatile and most likely preferred.
I would love being able to manually edit the world with different “brush” sizes, even down to a per voxel basis 
If you think about it though, editing at the voxel level is already taking place. When you go to mine or build a house, voxels are removed or added one by one.
I remember Tom discussing something along the lines on stream once. He suggested that this could be something that comes down the road, but was reserved to commit to it. So there might be some troubling issues, someone could give it a shot and mod it in though, once again I don’t know if the final out come would cause a lot of issues.
I would assume the issue lies in how an object would be built or removed piece by piece. The AI would just have to be really smart.
I’m curious…
bob is building an army and needs his tank back… right 
lol
… um how??? …
All this talk about mining… I wonder if we will ever see a Build hearth or thermal expansion release for this (WAY into the future). Don’t you just love the ednless posibilities of modding 
Following the mining code around, it eventually winds up at a call to
Terrain.subtract_point(point)
Where point is the position of the cube to remove.
Looking at terrain.lua more you can see
Terrain.add_point(point,tag)
Where point is the position of the cube to add, and tag is an id number for the block. Here’s the grass block in code.
"grass" : { "tag" : 300, "color" : "#75b370", "kind" : "grass" },
All the blocks and their id’s can be found in
stonehearth/data/terrian/terrain_blocks.json
Finally calls to add cubes
-- get access to point3
local Point3=_radiant.csg.Point3
-- create the cube
radiant.terrain.add_point(Point3( 10 ,10, 10), 300)
The biggest thing is getting the position right, as of now this was done without the use of a ui and the mouse.
I’ve started a new topic discussion about this type of feature becoming a mod. If you are interested 
I think my only trouble with a 4 block mine entrance is that all other doors and ground-place-able objects in the game are 1, 3, 5?, 7, etc. blocks wide. (At least all the ones I can remember are.) This suggests that paths will default to 3 blocks. Picket gates open across 3 blocks. So the 4 block mine threw me. If it doesn’t get changed, I’ll get over it and figure out how to make things work. It just seemed like a unanticipated departure from what has been the standard and it made using mines non-intuitive in a city planning sense. Up to that point, the game has taught me to think in terms of odd numbers of blocks she laying out streets and buildings.
One thing I hope that does get changed is that currently (Haven’t checked with the newest Alpha 7 build, but current of the build before that) the mining tool cannot be placed anywhere I want it. The world seems like it is divided (by the mining tool) into 2x2 voxels and you can’t mine half voxels that way. What I mean is that the cursor will select 4 voxels, but if you try to move the cursor just one voxel over, you can’t. You have to move it 2 voxels before it will switch to a new position. This means that when I am planing out my city and I’ve got where I want my mine to be, I better hope that I’ve chosen the correct 4 voxels and am not 1 voxel off.
i know it all sounds obsessive, but it is unintuitive and jarring as a player to encounter. I’m sure I will make (have made) ways to work around the limitations, but they are unintuitive restrictions that blind-side the new player. What I means is that someone coming to the game for the first time, starting to build her grand new Stonehearth city better hope that the road she just laid out leads to the correct 2 voxels that will be the entrance to her mine (the next logical progression in her city), or she will be faced with one of two choices: restart the map with a new seed and lose all that she has built up to that point, or continue on forever having a road that doesn’t quite lead to her mine entrance. Neither is really going to make the new player happy, which detracts from the overall joyous feeling of the game.
(For anyone who cares, the logical progression in the game seems to be chop trees/set up trapper area/build carpenters shop --> promote farmer (though I leave this for a long time)/build buildings --> promote weaver/lay out roads --> mine/promote mason. Somewhere in there might be promote shepherd, but I don’t know where yet. Trapper seems disconnected from the main city progession right now. He makes food (early need) and brings in pelts for weaver (later need), but it is harder to control how fast he levels than other professions so you can’t depend on what him reaching a certain level in X days game time. I’m curios what other people see as their natural progression through the game?)
Woo I got the quote system working…
This is intersting, if these are numbers for doors why not create a drop down selection for other numbers (Instead of four). If a door is 3 wide you want to mine a 5 voxel corridor so that the door is central (1voxel either side) and I think a drop down selection of width would be a suitable system. However, I can’t code at all and don’t know if this would raise issues with current code.
I was about to write a big post about how this is all good and proper but not really fitting but alas, I have expectations to live up to. Enjoy your unhandy mining tool. Note that this will likely come with all sorts of evil consequences that I don’t even dare to think of.
(sadly Discourse doesn’t seem to support gfycat’s HTML5 videos).
I am awed.
I am amazed.
I am flabbergasted.
I take my hat off to you, sir.
I’d really like to see one-block fences and two or four block gates. Wouldn’t two-block gates be perfect for stereotypical saloon doors like these?
I’d also like to point out that I couldn’t find a real picture of saloon doors, so this is actually a picture of a saloon door picture on a regular door, which is insanely cool. I don’t need this in the game, though. 
You can mark land as a mining zone, and then suspend mining without removing the mining zone. This gives you a visible [in the design modes] marker of the grid’s position. Admittedly this is a bad “solution”, to the point of where I would not consider it a solution.
Single-block mining would require you to mark every single block if you mine off the grid. While the current system lacks precision, it is pretty fast to set up a large mining zone. This is a better solution, but not the best.
Currently, the world is set up using a grid of 4 by 4 cubes, horizontally seamless, and a gap of one cube vertically. I’d want to see an option to divide the 4 x 4 cubes into 2 x 2 cubes and 1 x 1 cubes [still keeping the gap] and then being able to change the grid’s XYZ offset, both for mining and the slice view. Want to offset a 4 x 4 x 4tunnel 1 - 3 blocks horizontally? Easy. Want a 6-tall tunnel that you can build walls in? Create mining zones at the default Y offset, then shift it up two and make more mining zones. Want an odd width-tunnel? Create mining zones, shift 1 or 3 blocks over, and create more. Want arches? Create 4 x 4 x 4 mining zones on the bottom, and 2 x 2 x 2 mining zones offset one to the right and 3 - 4 up, for example.
@RepeatPan Why must you post a better solution before I can even finish writing my suggestion? 
Your method still doesn’t allow for different starting or ending heights, though, so I think my offset suggestion is still worth posting.
I know there are ways to work around the problem, but they are not intuitive. No one building a mine is going to think, “This tool won’t select just any 4 blocks, so I better plan my mine before my road.” At least I know I didn’t when I first used mining. I thought, “I want my mine to go there so I will build my road to there, and then put my mine … hey!”
Anyway, I think @RepeatPan has got us all beat, so no worries.
Your suggestion is very fitting as I personally disagree with this “odd numbers are the game’s core” too and agree with you that this “precise” mode mining is making things complicated. A proper solution ought to be found but as I’ve said, if people need to align their stuff so badly (up to the point where they may break their game with it), then so be it.
The discussion will be never ending: There will be some folks who wish to align their stuff to a tile (i.e. “doors have odd numbered widths”) and folks who wish to align their stuff to the space between tiles (i.e. “doors have even numbered widths”). In the end, there will probabaly be use cases for both scenarios. I don’t think it will be possible to satisfy both, unless you say “Alright, doors are 2n wide but can be placed in odd numbered spaces (so there’s half a block on each side)”. That’s probably the only, and best, solution there is, although “half blocks” kinda breaks the voxel idea.
Adjusting the height is just another number in the same file, although this will screw up a lot more due to the layers and what not.
Side note: It should be possible to have different mine modi and what not, but this wasn’t asked for and as a quick-and-dirty-mod, it wasn’t possible to implement this without messing around with JS/HTML. I’ve shown you the way though, hook it up to a CallHandler that sets the constant (one for server and client each) and you should be good to go (pseudo: Mining_Button_Size_N.onclick = set_size_client(n); set_size_server(n); open_normal_mining_tool()).
@RepeatPan, I’ll say that I don’t think that there is anything wrong with making even numbered items in the world or whatever. I am one single data point saying that as I’ve played the game, it has given me the impression that I should be planning on odd numbers. Then they threw a even numbered min shaft at me, which was counter to what the game had impressed on me up to that point. If there is greater diversity presented at all points in the game (i.e. some (ground) things are even by even voxels, some are odd by odd, and some are odd by even), then I am less likely to be thrown when the tool forces an even opening. I may be wrong in my impression and this may already be in the game, but that was what I had intuited up to that point.