Shamrock Island is where most Newbies will begin their lives in Aerendel. If you can see the nearly flat dark area with the purple minerals glowing in the hills behind it, there’s supposed to be a cave opening that shouldn’t be too obvious from out here at sea. I thought I could quickly pop a cave in and move on to some scripting.
Nope.
‘Creating’ a cave is a lot easier than I thought it would be. You Add two ‘rooms’, manipulate one of them upside down over the other, pull their edges together (up for one, flip your point of view over with your mouse, then ‘up’ for the other one), get the interiors to look as spectacular as you want and then slide these rooms into place, cut a hole in the floor/wall of some existing geological feature on the room/rooms you want the cave to connect with.
But I found out the hard way, ya can’t mess with the terrain after it’s in place. Anything you do in your cave when it’s beneath some other terrain can have devastating, catastrophic effects on the terrain above.
So the north east corner of the northern cliff wall down to the sea doesn’t quite look like this anymore.
But, thankfully, some of the tools that come with the development package (especially the plateau tool 🙂 ) make it easy to pretty much get things back to where they were before you got over confident and did something stupid.
It just took me a couple more hours than I thought it would and I still have to fix a few things and find all the pieces of my cave to either delete it and start over or make sure it’s out of the danger zone and work on it, make danged sure there aren’t any problems before I slide it back in place between the slightly modified base of the cliff and the hills above.
I never did get to the scripting part yesterday. 😦
—–Jim