Also Planet Explorers which had similar terraformed mineable terrain was Unity.
Their biggest problem was that jet flight, rail and fast cars was part of the story, the tile based terrain generators cannot keep up. Best limit to slow travel and not get too high up (you can already see the tile borders on mountain spires)
Terraforming with the pick and rake and bare hands becomes a problem of trying to get smooth results rather than pock marked over and under.
The shovel LMB would get the same amount as the pick but from a wider shallower area for a smoother result. RMB attack would be used to drop whatever material you have put into your ammo slot but again in a wider area pile than your bare hands dropping the material would be.
This leaves the shovel to be the tool for a much smoother surface that becomes more suitable for raking perfectly smooth , or is good enough for cave walls. This is similar uses that the shovel had in Planet Explorers and Wurm Online.
You could also add a spade counterpart to the shovel that cuts out blocks and replaces them - using the ammo slot as the field proxy for not having the block workbench, with the limitation that you can only get the natural textures of what you are digging. This would be used instead of the shovel where you want to cut and place smooth squares. Removal works like the sledgehammer but on natural landscapes not block constructions.
While I think it is unrealistic for a shovel and spade to be used to shape and dig stone - we can already shape stone with our bare hands so I would not restrict the material list - save that for realism mods.
Like existing tools make tech tier versions available as we get better ores.
Specifying the creation costs rather than adding them up for blueprints is more of an issue that planks and beams can result in unrealistic construction costs.
This is already a problem in survival that things can be upsized beyond their materials or using one lumber even though you are downsizing. This could be fixed by putting adjustment limits then making more initial size options for planks and beams to cover reasonable cost ranges - like we already have short and long ladders.
This is not yet a problem for blocks - adding costs up for blueprints will enable you to recreate the block as if you made it yourself. But once blocks are resizable making them essentially planks and beams made of different materials - then the same problem of unrealistic construction costs arises with blocks.
Since the blueprint ghost with construction inventory was deemed off topic I opened a new one since nobody else did. It can actually be generalized to any construction - not just blueprints. And that idea works alongside the blueprint bench idea - make it in the bench - or take it out of the bench to dump mats into it later on. Even works if the bench is expanded into a virtual editor as suggested.
The OP idea is how Planet Explorers did it, if you wanted to save it back to the game it required the materials, or you could just save it within the editor. Problem is the game was still running while you had the editor open, so you would be dead of thirst/hunger if you did not flip back and forth - better if such an editor was outside the game entirely for that reason. The other problem is the editor did not work in first person view - so it was hard to make things in proper scale that looked good closeup. Even with the editor idea you would still need a way to blueprint things that you already had built in the game by selecting its pieces (see how Fallout 76 does this). Maybe you are making a fort and spent a lot of time in game working on the corner tower - just select it and reuse that design in the other corners (but should not be able to reuse the mats!)
https://forum.rising-world.net…134-partial-construction/
As far as requiring blueprints to have materials? There will never be a solution to please all, that is what game mode and gameplay options are far.
If someone wants a creative mode for a D&D campaign where they rubber stamp buildings down to make a town - let them.
If someone else wants full PVP survival where even blueprints requiring materials are considered an exploit because you do not have to waste time figuring out how to rebuild something that got destroyed> - let them ban them.
If the rest of us just want immersion where we can see the things we are still working on, as both a reminder list and reserved materials - let us!
Partial construction is used in many building/survival/crafting games. This is a ghost version of the item that has a container inventory for placing the necessary materials to build the item, which converts to the real thing once all the items are placed in it. More advanced version of the feature fills in the ghosting as materials are received. They could be simple as items that can be dropped on a workbench as work in progress, placeable items for planning out your floorplan, to complicated building blueprints (when they require materials).
Partial construction banks materials for intended constructions, saving you from having to keep track outside the game of what materials are needed for what you are working on and making sure you do not spend them on anything else. I would prefer if items can be retrieved from the inventory rather than making them a material sink, this allows you to delay construction by taking back materials.
Partial construction serves a purpose in planning to see how things layout and fit together. They do not have N(PC) colliders, you can go right thru them, although they need collision for being placed/dropped/moved and storing materials in their inventory. You should be able to use ghosted plank and beams or blocks to plan out your shack construction - although you will need to make temporary construction platforms since you cannot stand on invisible floors.
Partial construction is also great for multiplayer, for those large community projects that everyone can help build by providing resources into the building inventory. This is where showing the partial construction promote teamwork, you can see that half built bridge getting closer to completion and others will want to join in to help finish.
