Stone Shaping

[Thalius]

I wanted to pose the idea of adding the ability to shape various stone blocks by the use of a chisel.  A mod I liked to use in M-craft was the old "chisel n bits" mod, which allowed the player to craft just about anything they could possibly imagine by shaping blocks one tiny bit at a time.  The bits could be saved and placed to alter any other block in the game (almost) allowing for unlimited creativity, if you had the time to put it to full use.

I would not suggest creating something like the full chisel n bits mod in VS, but something inspired by it.  Drop the "bits" part of the mod and allow for the chiseling of stone materials.  In reality, little or nothing is usable after being broken off of a slab of stone or marble, so it does not make sense to keep the chiseled pieces in play anyway.  If a player had the ability to chip away small or large pieces of stone blocks, then the creativity on the building side of the game would  be greatly enhanced.  Depending on how small of a piece could be chiseled off of the stone material, just about anything could be sculpted in the game, large or small.

I would suggest that there be two ways a block can be "chiseled":

• The first, and safest way, would be through the use of a "Chiseling Bench".  Here, stone type materials can be carved with the option to undo changes made as long as the block is not removed from the bench.  Once removed, changes are permanent.  The block could be placed back on the bench for further sculpting, but nothing done in the previous session could be undone.
• The second way is faster but more risky, and created for larger projects like sculpting the outside of buildings or large sculptures- it  would be through the use of a chisel without the bench.  Draw back would be that any chiseling done is permanent with no opportunity to undo mistakes.

All that is broken off would be gone, so no storage worries on the bits left over.  Each block chiseled would be unique, though, and so the player that sculpted a lot of them would run into storage issues if they dismantled large projects since unique blocks could not be stacked; but that would be the player's problem to deal with in-game.  Perhaps a storage solution could be created specifically for chiseled blocks?

One suggestion would be to create a bag to carry sculpted items.  If you can carry 99 blocks in one slot in your inventory, then it would not be too far outside of the realm of logic to allow for placing sculpted blocks into a special bag for sculpted blocks that would take up one slot in your inventory.  When accessed it would open up an inventory window that showed the individual sculpted blocks that had been placed in it- up to 99 (or whatever the limit per slot will ultimately be).