Farthest Frontier Advanced Landscaping Guide

Preparation

Set your builder count to as high as you can spare, the maximum is 100. Each order will be worked on by three builders, and there will be a lot of orders so everything goes pretty quickly.

The Technique

The situation before we begin:

First build a platform as high as possible. Do this by flattening the highest 1x1 point and then adding one slope to it at a time. Here I have just made a flat 10x10 high and low for demonstration purposes.

Then extend it out with 10x1 areas where only one square is sloped down.

Do each area about 4 times until it is flat. You can stack the orders, don’t wait for each to finish before placing the next. With a bit of practice you get the a habit of double clicking at each end of the row.

If you want a big platform then start with a 10x10 area and do the inching trick in every second row and you’ll find the rows in between magically fill in too.

Once that is done you step out to the new slope and inch your way along one sloped square at a time. Here is the process about half way through.

You can do multiple sweeps for maximum effect, here I've been lazy and just done one pass. That took one year. My settlement is halfway across the map so it would have been even quicker if it were closer.

Once you're happy with it and want to build just give a big order to flatten the whole area.

The final result.

To lower ground you do the opposite, ideally draining into a water edge tile because it can’t be raised and will pull everything down (be careful though it’ll make that area next to water unbuildable).

If you want to make an impassable wall you do one of each with a gap between them. This can be useful to seal off back entry points, like this.

The other entrance, an effective defense that was very quick to set up. Seed: 6B28A54B800 Arid small, for anyone interested.

Methods Comparrison

I wanted to see how much more effective doing every second row is compared to just one area.

To test this I used the flat area I created in the tutorial above, flattening the top and bottom 10 extra times each to make sure everything was very flat and even.

On the left I did two 1x10 rows with a space in between inched out ten times, on the right I did one 3x10 row inched out ten times. I gave all orders four times at each step. I put the method I thought would win on the left just in case there was any advantage from the right originally being the higher ground.

The results were slight but noticeable even in this the closest comparison. when compared to a 10x10 the difference would be much more significant.

The main advantage is perhaps the speed at which it gets done. Many more builders will work on multiple 1x10 rows than on single larger areas. Also there is only about half as much work that needs to be done because you're getting the rows in between adjusted for free. For five 1x10s it is 320 work, compared to 562 work for an equivalent single 9x10 area.

Mechanical Explanation

The reason this works is that when you give a terrain level order it effects the shape of the ring of tiles surrounding the order. The outside points of that ring will stay fixed, but the inside points will use the area inside the order to calculate the new heights. In these pictures the highlighted area is a 3x10 surrounding the actual 1x8 area flattened.

Further Reflections

The change to the tool's strength in 8.0 means 3x orders are now good enough (rather than the 4x mentioned above).

Doing 1x1 has a useful effect, it always ends up flat. Similar with 2x1.

The double spacing effectively forces the transform along a single axis. So if you have a slope on two angles you might as well do 10x10 orders to transform the ground along both axes at once (ie, it isn't worth hashing them like #).

I wonder, but haven't tested, if 5x1 orders might be nearly as effective with height but cut the labor cost in half again.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2866442977

Advanced Landscaping Guide

Preparation

The Technique

Methods Comparrison

Mechanical Explanation

Further Reflections

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