Using stone for land reclamation

[GotLag]

I had a quick search and people have suggested bridges over water, and bulldozers that clear dirt tiles and fill in water tiles, but how about simply using X amount of stone to convert a tile of water to a tile of land? Place it like a structure except instead of creating a building entity it changes a map tile. Now (for a price) you can build over/through pesky waterways! No extra over/under pathing/layering like a bridge, no digging moats around your base to make it invulnerable to biters, but finally a way to deal with inconvenient water or make a shortcut between two peninsulas. It would also be a godsend for train layouts.

[just_dont]

Now that's quite a useful idea!
We may be getting ships and planes and other fancy stuff in some future update, but for now it would be a great (and very simple) idea to implement!
I'd surely like to request it as a mod, but alas, this kind of terraforming is not possible through lua interfaces at the moment.

[Sedado77]

I think the engine doesn't make it possible, but I realy like the idea, for its simplicity and also I think it woudl be usefull

[Phy]

Since water doesn't "flow", there's no reason not to just fill it in where it's no needed. Some level of terraforming would be interesting.

[GotLag]

I was thinking it should be somewhat expensive, maybe 32 stone per tile, i.e. an entire stack just to make enough land for a single stone furnace. As it is there's not that much use for stone now, compared to how much is available.

[Kiapha]

That depends on what mods you use, and how heavily you fortify. I think you should be able to use stone or wood to reclaim land, as well as iron or steel to build bridges. That would allow plenty of different options even with stone-hungry mods installed.

[drs9999]

I'd surely like to request it as a mod, but alas, this kind of terraforming is not possible through lua interfaces at the moment.

I think the engine doesn't make it possible, but I realy like the idea, for its simplicity and also I think it woudl be usefull

Just to clarify this. It is absolutly possible to create a mod that allow something like that. It just nobody did it yet

[just_dont]

Just to clarify this. It is absolutly possible to create a mod that allow something like that. It just nobody did it yet

Current lua interfaces do not allow terrain modification in any form. So no, it's not possible to do that the way topicstarter described.
It may be possible currently to make "bridges" with mods, but not permanent terraforming.

[drs9999]

Indeed! A quote from the 0.9.0 changelog:

Scripting:
It is possible to change tiles from script using the game.settiles

But yeah, it is not documented on the wiki...

[GotLag]

That depends on what mods you use, and how heavily you fortify. I think you should be able to use stone or wood to reclaim land, as well as iron or steel to build bridges. That would allow plenty of different options even with stone-hungry mods installed.

I used to play Simcity on the Super Nintendo as a kid, and at certain stages you could unlock landfill, to reclaim water to build on, but there were only about 3-4 you could get so you had to think carefully about where you put them. I wouldn't want it to be that limited but making it cost a lot of stone is just the first way I thought of to make it require planning and expansion for resources, instead of just automatically filling in every bit of water except a 2x2 pool for your engine pumps.

[slpwnd]

Lua API allows to change the tiles, so this is doable from mod already.

[GotLag]

Time to get to work, then.