Clay Forming; Haste makes Waste?

[PhotriusPyrelus]

So I was clay-forming some crocks and I noticed something.  I accidentally made a single one, so I had to make 3 more to have a multiple of four, and I noticed it only takes me 2 clay to make a crock when making them one-by-one, but if I take the same 8 clay it would take to make 4 one-by-one and try to make a set of four at once, it only gets about 75% the way done before I run out of clay.  That...really doesn't seem right.

[maibock]

Interesting, will test this the next time I end up playing.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

I figured it out...

When you lay down the first piece of clay, one unit of clay is removed from your inventory and you get 89 voxels worth of clay, 25 'in hand' and 64 on the ground in an 8x8 square.  When the 'in-hand' voxel count reaches 0, another unit of clay is deducted from your inventory, but only 25 more voxels of clay are added to your 'in hand' counter.

So that first piece of clay is worth almost four times what every subsequent piece of clay is.  I realize that clay isn't exactly an extremely scarce resource, but I'm not sure the time savings are worth the material loss.  No matter how many items you're working with, "copy previous layer" only applies 4 voxels at a time.

Assuming this should be fixed, the favorite solution I've come up with would be if putting down the first piece of clay made a 6x6 (36 voxel) square, and gave you 18 voxels in-hand, and every subsequent unit of clay increased the in-hand counter to 64.  Thus every inventory unit would be worth 64 voxels.

Something I noticed while testing the above: if you remove all voxels of clay from the workspace (such that your voxel counter would hit 89), the workspace is cleared, but the clay is not returned to your inventory; this should be fixed.  You can always glob clay back together.

Edited May 24, 2023 by PhotriusPyrelus

[Echoweaver]

Huh. That does sound like unintended behavior. Good catch.