(minable) beach tiles around water areas

[VampireSilence]

TL;DR

Convert terrain next to water tiles into "beach" tiles and let that beach tiles be minable, which converts them into water.

Also look at my other suggestion, which is strongly related to this one. I splitted the topics to keep the board/thread structure tidy.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=100615

What ?

I know you hate the idea of seperating our bases from biters with water tiles (ditches), so i specifically aimed for a non-OP solution here. Both suggestions together make it impossible to do so.

While world generating, convert every regular ground tile in the range of ~10 tiles around water tiles into a "beach" tile, which is either made of gravel or sand (whatever you like more or even both) and let those tiles be minable. So its not exactly a "place water-fill wherever you want"-solution, but still allows for small adjustments to be made to the generated terrain.

Why ?

I don't care if you get a ressource from this (maybe raw stone i guess), my main goal is to make small islands within large water areas be removable, so its easier to build large complex structures (like 2N-Reactors or so) on water, which need water pumps in specific positions and so on.

[mrudat]

Sounds like something that should be easily doable by a mod.

Some mods that do parts of what you're suggesting:
* https://mods.factorio.com/mod/platforms <-- removable tiles that go over water

Any number of mods that override and/or modify terrain generation.

A trivial solution would be something like:

• on_chunk_generated
  • find all land tiles adjacent to water tiles
    • replace the tile with a sand tile
    • perhaps add a 'sand' resource entity on the tile, that when exhausted, replaces the tile with a shallow water tile.

To do it properly, it's a bit more complicated than the above, but that's probably a good first approximation.