grandoth

I came here searching because I wanted the same thing. Yesterday, I was playing with chiseling as I hadn't done much before. I started making contours for a large log cabin style house made out of quarter logs. After about 8-12 blocks, that was enough. No way am I spending that kind of time, but I think it would be cool to be able to continue that shape if it didn't take so long. I like the NPC idea, and the possibility of dupe or mirror. I had an alternative thought like a contour gauge, form following mechanical router type machine. You chisel the block you want to replicate. It goes in an input slot. A raw materials (unchiseled) slot and finally an output (chiseled) slot. Hook the machine up to mechanical power like a quern and it converts the blocks over time. If this is still too OP, perhaps there's a tool head slot for a chisel that wears out over time. Maybe require 2 input blocks, the one to be duped (to capture the block's orientation) and a second analogous to a die or a master. Making a die/master block could require some special materials like resin and/or a process akin to a pit kiln. Perhaps oriented blocks that are in the same family could be inputs for the same family (e.g. chiseled a birch log, but duping into an oak log). While probably too advanced to be vanilla and within lore, it seems like it would at least fit in the mechanic goals of the game to automate creation of blocks you want to duplicate.