🌱 Kayser's Automatic Terrain Designations v0.4.1

Less of a Mess

This is a follow-up release for v0.4.0's farmland preparation automation, focused on making it smoother, faster, and a lot less fussy around awkward terrain.

The short version: farmland preparation is more robust, access ramps are smarter, large jobs should be noticeably lighter, and there are a few new quality-of-life controls for keybindings, notifications, and vehicle assignment.

🚜 Farmland Preparation Improvements

Farmland preparation now handles more of the strange edge cases that show up when you ask a mine tower to turn rough terrain into nice respectable farm plots.

The biggest changes are around access and edges:

• access ramps can now be created for multiple inaccessible farming clusters in the same tick
• reachability can propagate through adjacent farming designations that share matching-height edges, reducing unnecessary extra ramps
• final filling and rim alignment now use dumping designations instead of leveling designations, ignoring debris
• completed final farming designations are removed immediately after the completion notification, so they do not interfere with nearby follow-up farming patches
• exposed corners now get diagonal preparation shoulders when both adjacent cardinal shoulders exist, avoiding issues with dirt falling off in corners
• diagonal corner rim alignment designations now close fill-area corners more cleanly

This should make elevated and coastal farming projects behave better, especially around shoulders, rims, and follow-up patches.

🧩 Mod Interoperability

v0.4.1 has been extensively tested with Moriarty's GamePlay++ to make sure farmland preparation interoperates cleanly during real farming workflows. Video: https://streamable.com/iju6z1

⚡ Faster Large Farming Sessions

Large farmland jobs should be noticeably less expensive to run.

Ramp generation now probes perimeter tiles instead of scanning deep into every possible interior tile, which can reduce candidate work by roughly 7x for large areas. Ramp reachability checks are also cached during placement attempts and capped so pathological cases do not spiral into long stalls.

Farming automation itself also does less repeated work:

• access/pathability rechecks are throttled for large active sessions
• pending fill-area tile sets are cached and rebuilt only when the farming state changes
• large auto-reactivated sessions should produce less background overhead after loading a save

🛣️ Better Access Ramp Behavior

Ramp placement now checks whether vehicles can actually reach the ramp before committing to a candidate. Accessible candidates are preferred; if no accessible candidate exists, ATD still places the best available option and reports that clearly.

Ramp generation also evaluates all four cardinal directions now. The old half-space direction restriction has been removed, while scoring still prefers ramps aligned toward the tower. This gives ATD useful fallback routes when the obvious direction is blocked by terrain, buildings, or water.

Ramp warnings are now shown only as vanilla-style notifications on the mine tower:

• failed ramp generation
• truncated ramp placement
• ramp placed but not currently accessible

If you prefer quieter automation, these warnings can be disabled globally with rampNotificationsEnabled in ATDsettings.json or:

atd_set_ramp_notifications on|off

🚚 Auto-Release Idle Vehicles

The Terrain Designations inspector now has an Auto-release when idle toggle.

When enabled for a tower, ATD will temporarily unassign excavators and trucks while no mining or leveling work is pending, then automatically reassign them when work resumes. This is useful for farmland automation that switches between mining and dumping, or for towers that only occasionally need attention and otherwise tie up vehicles.

The global default is:

autoReleaseVehiclesWhenIdle

It can also be changed with:

atd_set_auto_release_vehicles_when_idle

For debugging and vehicle bookkeeping, v0.4.1 also adds:

atd_get_assigned_vehicles

This lists mine towers, assigned vehicles, per-vehicle job state, ATD's auto-release setting, and which vehicles ATD has released.

⌨️ Corner Mode Settings

Corner designation mode is now more configurable:

• corner rotation now uses the player's mapped rotate key instead of always using R
• the corner mode key can be changed with the new cornerDesignationKey setting
• the default is still K

You can edit ATDsettings.json directly or use:

atd_set_corner_designation_key

The command accepts Unity KeyCode names, such as Alpha1 or F1.

🌐 Translations and UI Polish

This release includes revised Swedish, German, and Russian translations, with terminology aligned more closely to the base game.

Portuguese translation has also been added.

Some panel wording has been cleaned up:

• Mining designations
• Ore quality
• Ore composition
• Farmland preparation

The Farmland Preparation panel can now start collapsed by default using:

farmingPanelCollapsed

or:

atd_set_farming_panel_collapsed on|off

📦 Compatibility

As before, ATD is compatible with vanilla saves and can be added to or removed from existing saves safely.

Settings should migrate automatically. Existing changed settings are preserved, and new settings are added with their defaults.

Thanks again to everyone testing farmland automation in the wild. v0.4.1 is very much a "make the big new thing behave better under pressure" release, and your edge cases are what make that possible.

🌱 Kayser's Automatic Terrain Designations v0.4.0

This one is a pretty big quality-of-life release for anyone who likes making mines, farms, and terrain projects without hand-painting every little bit of dirt.

🚜 New: Farmland Preparation Automation

No more dirt-y work!

ATD can now help prepare farmable ground from flat level designations inside a mine tower area.

Draw your flat level designations, select the mine tower, open the new Farmland Preparation panel, and enable Farmland Preparation Automation. ATD will:

• temporarily dig unsuitable top material one layer lower where needed
• restore the original level designations for final filling
• restrict the tower's dump rules during filling so trucks use farmable material like dirt/compost
• restore the tower's dump rules when the work is done
• add temporary access ramps when excavators or trucks cannot reach the work area
• clear vehicles out of the fill area before committing final fill orders
• add support shoulders near exposed drops/ocean edges to reduce dirt spill-off

It also keeps running in the background after you close the inspector. On load, it can automatically re-enable for towers that were already doing farmland work.

🔔 Vanilla-Style Notifications

v0.4.0 adds ATD notifications that behave much more like normal CoI notifications:

• ✅ Farming complete: green one-time notification when preparation and filling are done
• 👷 Excavator complete: clickable green one-time notification when a vehicle depot finishes building an excavator, so you can send it to work immediately
• ⚠️ Ramp warnings: translated warning text for failed or incomplete access ramps

Excavator completion notifications can be toggled with:

atd_set_excavator_completion_notifications 

🌐 Translations

ATD now has localization support for the main panels, tooltips, status text, and related notifications.

Included languages:

• English
• Swedish
• German
• Russian

This covers Terrain Designations, Farmland Preparation, Ore Composition, and the new notification messages.

ATD will also load any additional language file added under translations/, so community translations can be dropped in without needing a new mod build.

📋 Quick Farming Start

1. Draw flat level designations inside a mine tower area.
2. Select the mine tower.
3. Open Farmland Preparation.
4. Enable Farmland Preparation Automation.
5. Let the tower crews do the ugly dirt work.

Only flat level designations participate. Corner/sloped designations are ignored by the farming automation.

Important: with the default settings, when this version loads a save, any mine tower that contains only flat leveling designations may be treated as farmland work and start Farmland Preparation Automation automatically. If you use flat level designations for non-farming projects, check those towers after loading or turn off reEnableFarmingOnLoad.

📦 Compatibility

As before, ATD is compatible with vanilla saves and can be added to or removed from existing saves safely.

Any changed settings in ATDsettings.json should migrate.

Thanks to everyone testing, reporting edge cases, and pushing this mod into weirder terrain projects than I would ever have found on my own. Have fun turning questionable rock fields into respectable farmland.

AutoTerrainDesignations v0.3.0 — Manual Corner Designations

Corner designations — the special diagonal-slope tiles that were previously only available through generated designations — can now be placed manually.

Corner placement mode is available from within any terrain designation tool (Mining M, Dumping Z, Leveling N). Enter it via the new ▲/▽ toolbar buttons or by pressing K when within one of the terrain designations tools.

What you can do

🔲 Choose the corner type. Outer (convex) and inner (concave) corners each have a dedicated toolbar button. Press K to flip between them.

🔄 Rotate the orientation. Press R to rotate the unique corner clockwise (NW → SW → SE → NE), so you can face the slope in any direction.

↕️ Set height with Q/E. The height offset from the active tool carries through into corner mode, so the placed slope lands exactly where you intend.

🧲 Snap to existing designations automatically. When you hover over a tile adjacent to an existing designation, corner mode reads the neighbour's height and variant and matches them — both edge-sharing and diagonal neighbours are considered. Vanilla designations snap to corner designations the same way, so you can seamlessly extend from placed corner designations.

⛏️ Place a diagonal slope in one drag. Hold and drag a rectangle. The area fills with a checkerboard of outer (▲) and inner (▽) corners that interlock into a continuous diagonal slope — no tile-by-tile placement required.

🔧 Works with all three designation tools. The placed corners use whichever tool is active — Mining, Dumping, or Leveling.

Auto Terrain Designations v0.2.3

This patch adds experimental Remove Debris support.

You can now designate blocking debris in a mine tower area for mining/removal with a dedicated sweep button. (Auto mode can also fall back to debris removal when no useful product is found, before targeting dirt.)

The debris action avoids digging into the ground and overwriting existing terrain designations, while still allowing debris in forested areas to be marked for removal.