Terraforming

[Safou]

can you change the biome ? if you dig the land and it becomes dirt does it turn after time ?

[Pildream]

from what i have noticed, it does change . Biomes expand over dug terrain and may occupy territory that previously was other biome, but it takes a lot of time .
I guess the devs can explain exactly how that works

[Chiprel]

There is very informative post about terraforming by Xcom on HnH forums. Which was seatribe first game and salem took over lots of hnh server mechanics:
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... =2&t=35295
Scroll down to terraforming. It's probably very similiar in salem.
+The terrain touching dirt in salem will grow over the dirt randomly.

[Kandarim]

Something that is completely not applicable is the trees terraforming land for you. The dirt must be touching some terrain type you wish to expand.

I didn't actually notice before that purity nodes seem to always max at mapgrid corners, but that does make some kind of sense. Will have to investigate

[Tammer]

Any biome will expand onto turned over soil, thus expanding that biome type.

If you want to expand a 5x5 yellow (autumn) into a 500x500, simple make a path square around the 500x500, and turn everything inside to dirt(dig it over), except the yellow biome, and watch as it expands Or any specific biome/sub-biome for that matter you wish to grow. (If any other type of unwanted biome randomly spawns inside your 500x500 square, simple remove it by redigging it over. It takes you to be very active in the areas of turned over dirt also for the biome's to regrow faster, If the area is very inactive (no through traffic of players) then it will stay dirt forever either way, as biome expansion/regrowth only works when the map grid is loaded from the server(requires a player to activate the tile on the server by going into it), so for this to work, and to get desired results, you must be very active in an attempt to perfectly manage the growth of a large area into a single specifc biome))

Now only the sky is the limit on how you go about doing this, with channels of paving to bring all the biomes together to create a grid of different biome's of making 1 huge biome to spawn a specific type of item.

Pendle forest held my pet project in testing this on roanoak(It may still exist, and you can see the squares of pure dirt still left behind inside square paving, which i started to use for testing), shortly before its destruction by the russians, which then after i ditched the very deep research required into the subject. I may one day pick it up again, but who knows.

I know a hand full of items, besides the wild garlic inside the yellow sub-biome of the autumn forest biome, and what items spawn inside them specific biome, but to make a whole library of this would take intense amounts of work. Good Luck if you wish to continue it.

PS: If you never guessed by my description, Paving stops biome regrowth, it cannot grow over it, It can only grow onto dirt tiles adjacent to it.

PPS: If you can find were the Hive on roanoak once stood, you can see this evidence yourself in a random uncontrolled growth, in quite a large area as well.

Taken from this thread: http://forum.salemthegame.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8015&hilit=terrainforming

[Chiprel]

Something that is completely not applicable is the trees terraforming land for you. The dirt must be touching some terrain type you wish to expand.

Are you sure about that?
If there are no trees and stumps on bigger area the terrain will start to change (from 'puke' forest to grassland for example).
I didn't try to terraform land with trees as I was too lazy to do it but I'm assuming it might work the same as in haven with some trees being native to certain biome. Did anyone actually check it?

[Safou]

if you dig next to deep water or shallowed does it make shallowed water in that place or does it awkwardly make a hole ?

[Cheena]

You actually can't dig near water. There is not enough clearance to dig there or something