Thanks for all the feedback! I appreciate it. About digging up the voxels, yes you can mine them all out. The soft ones (lavender, hay, gravel) can be dug with the shovel. The brick & cobble are dug out with the pickaxe because they're meant to be more "solid." That should all work -- if you try it and it doesn't for you, please let me know. I'll test it again on my side.

Also on that note: Right now the new voxels go fairly deep into the ground, which leads to a little silliness for digging them out. (It's weird to see bricks stacked up a full meter down!) Mirzipan, who wrote the "Re:Core" script that lets these tools work, agrees and is trying to find a way that the voxel doesn't get painted so deeply.

I agree fully about getting grass being destructive. I've talked with Mirzipan about that part of his "Re:Core" script, and he thinks it may be possible to allow us to use tools like a scythe to get grass items without actually destroying the grass at all. If so, that will be great! Both for getting grass and for harvesting lavender. We would be able to manipulate the foliage part without actually destroying the ground surface!

Re the DDS files, this is part of the way that Keen uses voxels. They have to be highly compressed using a compression called BC7. A lot of texture programs can only compress/uncompress to BC3. If you want to look at those voxels, do a Google search for a program called "texconv." It's designed to let you convert from BC7 to BC3, so you can then open the files & use them.

Thanks again for all this!

I tested the grass with the pitchfork, and it said cannot be mined (though I also have re:core & re:collection enabled, was I not supposed to?). Anyways, sounds neat that there are things to come.

Thanks for the info on BC7 dds, I'll have to look into that. Like I had said before I was looking into creating a woodchips texture. I already have TGA files ready but I have to figure out how to get them to work in ME, so far I converted to DXT5 + Interpolated Alpha like the wiki said, but the voxels show up as blue squares sadly.

Yeah the new tools can be confusing. Each tool can only interact with one kind of voxel, so I had to make the 5 new tools to lay the 5 new voxels. If you wanted to dig Hay/Old Grass back up, you would just use the shovel -- the pitchfork doesn't have any shoveling ability. Though you know, I *might* be able to add that. It would be a sensible & intuitive thing to do at least.

Yeah the BC7 requirement is pretty restrictive. That DXT5 conversion is equivalent to BC3, so you would still need texconv to get it fully into BC7. Too many acronyms!

Yeah I tried to "mine" new grass with shovel/pickaxe and it said "cannot mine here". Though I did try to make a new pitchfork to see if that was the way to pick it back up.. which is funny you mentionned it.

I was also able to mine the voxel with a pickaxe by digging under it, which is just me being silly at that point (I think I also must have gotten lucky with strikes, because any direct strike at the grass voxel would say "Cannot mine here").

Edit: Heyy I got it working with Compressinator.. I have to adjust a lot of parameters, but it's a start https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1359584712

Some more feedback, I used the gravel bag this time. After using a gravel bag you should probably get your Linen String back(but it's not all too bad if you don't either).

Also I came across a couple oddities:
There is spottyness on placing the gravel voxel, and you can't place more gravel on gravel that is already placed (unlike the pitchfork which does allow it) so the spots can't be fixed... although this could have something to do with localizing the files so this might just be on my end.
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1359669740

Also, after not being able to place them over already placed gravel, if I looked at the ground anywhere else after that it would give this message (although, it would let me place voxels anywhere that basically wasn't gravel).
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1359669710

More great feedback and it's all appreciated! That's really strange that gravel is leaving those dead spots. It's easy enough for me to allow placing gravel on top of gravel. I had only hesitated because I didn't want people to "waste" their gravel bags by clicking on spots that were already painted. But it seems more important to make sure an entire area is paintable with no "dead" spots.

And that's a good idea about getting the string back. A nice quality-of-life feature. I know when regular tools reach 0 durability they return "broken" versions, so I assume that when the gravel bag reaches 0, I can have it return string. I'll try that out.

I've been thinking about harvesting grass, and it wouldn't be too much harder than what MrzVoxelPainterBehavior.cs is already doing. I've been thinking though it would probably be best to have it as a new behavior entirely: "MrzVoxelHarvestBehavior.cs" and basically the only difference is that it should have some code that adds an item to your inventory when you paint... Although thinking about it now, this is a bit more complicated than I thought because then you could paint 1 voxel and it would return the same amount of grass as painting 8 voxels. I tried messing around with it but coding is beyond me.

For starters though, I was thinking it should work like this (keep the voxel painting that already exists in mind so you can see how easy it would be to modify)
If material [from list] is targeted
Do: Replace with [Material(s)]
Do: Add to inventory [Inventory Items]

[from list] would just be the list of all the grasses, [material] replacement would be dirt, and [inventory item] in this case would be grass. Keeping it open to harvesting many kinds of voxels without damage allows for other mods like being able to make a hay fork that picks hay up, or a shovel that picks gravel back up etc. Might require more modding though like "handful of gravel" instead of giving back gravel bags for example, and just giving them a 5 stack size, but yeah.

It's funny, your idea is very similar to what I believe is in the works! And for the same reasons -- because of how much it opens us tools that can pick up and collect items without damaging or changing the voxels. I hope it will be available soon!

Bloody dependencies had me click trough 4 separate mod subscriptions. Mod looks nice, will use to pave a city once exams are done.