New Smithing Tool

[PhotriusPyrelus]

Let me first say that I really like the crafting mechanics in the game.  Napping, clay-forming, smything, they're all neat little mini games that I've been looking for in 'crafting' games.

That said, the smything one seems a little...tedious (Clay would probably actually be worse, but the "duplicate layer function" is amazing and clearly shows you have an interest in keeping players from being too bored).  Smything also burns through hammers like crazy (honestly, tool durability in pretty much all games with it has always seemed silly to me.  Have you ever used a real shovel?  As long as you don't leave them in the weather to rust and rot, they last decades, even with regular use).  It takes me around a fifth of a copper hammer just to make a single plate!  I know I'm not doing the optimal moves, but that still seems really excessive to me.

I think a simple 'fix' to both 'problems', would be to have a new tool; I want to be explicit here, this is a second tool you would use in concert with the regular hammer, because intricate stuff like the sawblade would still need the precision of a regular hammer.  Call it "Smything Hammer", or some such.  What it would do is, instead of just moving voxels by one space, it would move them linearly down to the next level or the next voxel on the rank or file.  I suggest a new tool instead of added functionaltiy to the regular hammer because that would double or nearly double the options in the "F" menu, making it somewhat cluttered.

Consider the image:

The orange indicates it is a level above the red/brown.  The green squares are empty.  Let us call the lower left most green square (1,1,0), 0 because it is empty.  The left-most single voxel would then be (1,5,1), the left orange voxel would be (3,5,2), and so on.

Suppose we want to move the (3,5,2) voxel in the positive-Y direction to be on the (*,*,1) plane.  With a regular hammer, that would take 3 strikes.  With my suggested "Smything Hammer" (or whatever), you would hit it "up" once, and it would go to (3,8,1).  If you hit it to the right, though, it would stop at (6,5,2), because the voxel at (7,5,2) would block it.



Not quite sure how it would work with an analogous "Heavy Hit" move (if it should even have such).  ...partly because I'm not 100% sure how heavy hit even works.  For example, consider the image.

I put an ingot on the anvil and I hit the (3,5,2) voxel (indicated with a blue marker).  It pushes the top and bottom three adjacent voxels up and down respectively.  Since the four corner voxels fall down, they don't complete the diagonal.  Makes sense.

I hit the (7,5,2) voxel.  The top works just like we expect from the first hit, but for some reason, the (8,4,2) voxel goes to (9,4,1) instead of the expected (8,3,1).  I do not understand why this happens, and in general, Heavy Hit seems very unpredictable in other less-controlled experiments, but this one I have repeated several times with several different positions; one side always behaves as expected, the other side does not.