Biomes & Nature A faster way to construct landscapes (like shovel but for placing)

[Bellatrix]

I'm plenty satisfied with how fast I can dig in this game. I haven't even made shroomite digging claws, because I can already excavate a large area in just a few minutes.
Building, however?
I'm the type of player who actually wants to do something with the countless thousands of dirt and stone blocks in my inventory. It's slow, though, placing blocks one at a time. Hand of creation plus building potion just isn't enough for me when I'm doing a 20,000 block build.

My perfect building tool in Terraria would be something to place blocks in a 3x3 area, and also be able to "stir" them with the RMB.
"stirring" picks one random block in a 5x5 area, and moves it to a random location in that same area.
If the location is empty, it must be orthagonally touching a block.
If the location has a block, they swap locations.
This is repeated many times a second, to quickly make something blocky and unnatural look a lot more natural.
Obviously for a few reasons (griefing, exploits) stirring would have to be limited to only common natural blocks; dirt, mud, stone, ash, sand+similar, as well as all hallow/corruption/crimson variants.

The block placed by the tool could simply be the first block in the player's inventory, seems straightforward enough.

 

[CTNC]

Definitely agree that building and filling in spaces could be made easier. I'm sure I'd accidentally place the wrong block a lot like I have the wrong paint a lot, (which is mostly my problem) especially if the block choices were limited.

Thinking about filling in places made me think of an alternative/additional idea: Let the Smart Cursor let you place blocks too.


Unrelated, but your pic is pretty.

 

[firecat666]

I'm sure this will never get implemented because it's never been implemented in 10 years, but we can hope at least.

Also,

Thinking about filling in places made me think of an alternative/additional idea: Let the Smart Cursor let you place blocks too.

Smart Cursor lets you place blocks in lines and it will fill a space around yourself with a circular shape (one block at a time) if you use it to place blocks on top of your character, but those functions are far too limited for filling big spaces.

 

[ppowersteef]

Dirt bombs fill this form a little bit, but I'm up for better alternates

 

[Olivempa]

Well, this idea of fast "bulk" building is expressed in some other games as blueprints. Notable example is Factorio.

 

[Kubiquity^3 🌳]

I think 3x3 is awfully small. For placement I think there should be say 3 options…how about 3, 5, & 7? A cousin to the gravedigger shovel, but it needs a name and crafting recipe and/or source as well…any ideas?

 

[firecat666]

I think 3x3 is awfully small. For placement I think there should be say 3 options…how about 3, 5, & 7? A cousin to the gravedigger shovel, but it needs a name and crafting recipe and/or source as well…any ideas?

If this was implemented via a tool it could have different size toggles like the Rubblemaker. I think 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5 would be quite enough. Maybe they could have more circular/cross shapes instead of squares too.

I'm not sure why the Shovel is the only item with this kind of function (affecting an area bigger than 1x1), but I'm guessing it's some kind of technical difficulty. Surely when Starbound came out there were people asking for Terraria devs to implement a more convenient construction system similar to the one in that game but obviously we never got it (except for a shovel).