Survey

Adventure > Landscaping > Survey Land

A Survey allows you to designate an area for leveling.

Click and drag with the tool to specify a rectangle, and your character will walk towards the center of this rectangle to place a flag. Once the flag is placed, the GUI will automatically appear. After closing the GUI or walking outside the range of the Survey, you can interact with the flag to bring the GUI back up.

Survey areas can't overlap each other. (Although some can, there is no real benefit to doing this)

Although survey's (the gui part) can only be opened by one hearthling at a time. Multiple hearthlings can actually be put to work on the same survey. Ones a hearthling is set to work (Make level) one can just close the survey-gui part. And then open it with an other hearthling and set it to work too (Just keep them from bumping into each other).

The GUI has 3 main components: A slider bar to determine the desired height, a "Make Level" button that will command your hearthling to attempt to make the land the desired height, and a "Remove" button to remove the Survey. Above these three components are four informational lines:

• Area: How large, in grid squares, the Survey is.(Maximum side length is 31 tiles. Ergo: Max area is 31x31 tiles (32x32 points))
• Peak to trough: The vertical distance between the highest and lowest points within the Survey.
• Units of soil required: or Units of soil left over: The difference between soil to dig and soil required. (this data includes locked tiles data)
  • If your hearthling will be digging more soil than placing, this is how much space you'll need to store soil.
  • If your hearthling will be placing more soil than they remove, this is how much extra soil will be required.
• Units of soil to dig: How much soil (or digging workload) is required to level the whole area. (this also includes locked tiles data)

Stockpiles of soil within the survey borders (or very near to a survey border*) will be used by the Survey, both for holding dug soil and for supplying soil to place. This can be very helpful, as the hearthling's inventory will then not be the limiting factor how much can be dug/placed in one run.

• ) The stockpile boundary can be fully outside the surveyed area if need be. Up to 1/11 tile distance (at least) from a survey border.

• ) Take care to not have stone/ore stockpiles that you would like to keep inside or near your survey. It will use those too if it can reach them.

Render-Scale effect on survey dots visibility.

While the GUI is visible, two elements are also made visible in the world:

• A red filled rectangle showing the size and resulting height of the Survey. (Can become partially or fully hidden if below ground)
• Colored dots at the tile corners. The color of the dots tells you what needs done at that point:
  • Blue dot indicate a spot below the desired height.
  • Green dot indicate a spot at the desired height.
  • Purple dot indicate a spot above the desired height.

Note: The client render-scale setting has a direct effect on the displayed size of the leveling dots. Higher render-scale make the dots smaller. See full-size image. (At render-scale 4.00 (custom client) they become more or less completely invisible.)

Make Level

Once the "Make level" button is clicked your hearthling will move fully autonomously, digging and placing dirt as necessary without further input.

The "Make level" process consist of two modes:

• First: Digging away all the high spots.
• Second: Fill up any remaining low spots.

All four points of tiles that are covered by the hitbox of some solid objects, like a tree or building, can't be terraformed and are ignored be the leveling hearthling(s). (but those locked tiles are not excluded from the survey information lines).

While digging away high spots, dug up soils is disposed into:

1. Any low spots that need filling. This is done directly and include otherwise impossible or hard to reach locations. (very useful to get rid of cliffs)
2. Any soil stockpile that is in reach of the active survey. (these are also used as soil-source when in filling mode)
3. Hearthlings inventory. (default for any dug up items)
4. Dropped onto the ground. (dropped soil will be ignored while filling low spots)

The following events will stop your hearthling:

• Stamina reaching 20% or below, while the Hearthling is out of water to automatically restore its stamina.
• Running out of soil while in filling mode.
• Running into a stockpile or other Hearthling (...) . (Wip/Talk).
• Walking out of the survey area. (usually a case where the hearthling needed to walk around some object near the survey border)
• (In some cases, where the hearthling is trying the reach some inaccessible point. It will just keep trying at infinite. ...)
• Combat.

Super-grids

Super-grid borders are hard borders when it comes to special terrain spanning game effects.
An easy way to detect/verify a mini-map border is also a super-grid border is to try to plant two overlapping surveys on two neighboring mini-maps. Normally you can't do this. But if you can, that mini-map border is also a super-grid border.
Ps: Best done diagonally when it comes to scanning a large area for a super-grid border.

Alternative ways are limited to winter season. Like building and lighting a fire and seeing where the snow melts. As only(?) liftable/transportable heat source an active compost bin also work nicely.

Notes

• A planted survey expire after ~2 days.
• A hearthling has a maximum survey pool of 5 survey's.
• The survey pool is refilled by 1 around every Real: 4h 20m (Game: 14h 15m ). (~5.6 survey's per real-day)
  • Deleted survey's are added back to the survey pool of the deleting hearthling. (up to its maximum of 5)

• The occasionally dug up Earthworm also count as soil. Take care if you like to keep those.

• (Soil can be manually put back into the ground (instead of dropping it), raising a tile point's level)
  • (This can also be done with earthworms and rocks)
• (Soil and worms(still? -- might not be the case anymore), when left on soft ground will be absorbed by the ground, raising it. (takes (?:3..9) minutes(rt)))
  • (Also works in winter with snow covered ground.)
  • (Rocks are not automatically absorbed by the ground)