Thinner Building Materials

look in the block bench and find the block material you want to use, look at its ID that is in red, write it down if you have to.
open up the console window (~ button next to the 1 button on your keyboard) and type item woodplank 64 and what the ID is.
Example: item woodplank 64 141
that will give ya 64 woodplanks with the material ID of 141

In principle, I believe it would not be a big change, code-wise, to add more -- even all -- of the already existing textures to the already existing "wood plank" and "wood beam" items you can already 'properly' make from the saw-bench, each with its own 'proper' cost.

This would take the cheating away and would greatly increase the building possibilities.

In a first stage, each could still cost 1 lumber, as now. Then, stone-looking planks/beams would cost stones, metal-looking would cost metal and so on. Of course, "wood plank" and "wood beam" would no longer fit as names, but this is also easy relatively easy to change (as there are not many localizations yet).

In fact, at least from outside, it seems so a little coding investment for so a big improvement that I wonder it is not the case to raise its priority a bit. Hint, hint... @red51...

A further step, of which some hint already leaked, would be the possibility to paint items with any RGB colour.

I like the way blocks work, I like my block suggestions that I made in 'past suggestions' to be considered (1/2 pitch incline, column segment) but I also like all the planks abilities to shrink and expand in various directions. It seems planks by far is giving everyone the most creative results which I can't reproduce with bricks. That's something I would agree with giving people more manipulation of planks is great with just more textures available. I do however worry in two regards one is client side / server side memory /space, I have never tested it so I would like others more knowledgeable than me to compare for example my friend is an extremely good builder built his roof entirely out of planks then went back on his roof and cut each individual plank for each and every shingle on his roof it looked great but I don't know the taxing cost of that on server side vs normal bricks. Is it virtually nothing in modern era of computing cost and saving, which I am guessing is the case. Maybe someone could test a very large project of all planks verses same with only bricks save in blueprint. In any regards to the result in that, even if it is taxing or requires more data to be piped to clients, I still like to see more plank textures. Because single games certainly don't need to worry about that.
Example:

I think that will become more complex though if Red51 ever decides on using planks in other things like rotating blue prints extra since you have to save size of planks/rotation/angle.

If there was a way to simply get windows to play nice with plank walls, I would be happy. I tried very hard not to use blocks in my new game but it's basically impossible unless you want to live in a windowless shack. I came here to say that I'm in full support of thinner building materials.

To my knowledge, the window pane will only automatically resize itself when pointing at a window frame. Otherwise, if you are doing something really custom, You should be able to use the normal keyboard commands for any construction objects in order to resize or rotate a window pane or window frame manually

I'm still waiting for the next update to the construction system. That should introduce scalable blocks. I'm imagining when that comes out then i can build with tiny blocks like in Blockscape. Which is great for me because I suck at constructions and I'm a lame and build out of blocks. ;-p

Scalable blocks will be great! As well as the other improvements to the construction systems hinted at or disclosed here and there. All of them require more or less extensive changes to the code and/or to the world file format and/or to the data base, though.

On the other hand, as I said above, extending the plank/beam repertory with the other existing material textures (stone, marble, plaster, metal, ...) would require no -- or very little -- change to the core of the programme, to the DB and to the worlds, as they already exist (as they can already be used, but by 'cheating')!

It would 'simply' be a matter of extending the UI lists and providing a cost for each, which could also be conventional in a first stage. I can only see the matter from outside the development of course, but basing on my 30+ years as a developer, I doubt it would take more than half a day of work of one person. And the usability gain would be huge.