jackatthekilns wrote:I was thinking that larger tree farms was a intended effect.
Gil touched on this above, but my reasons for implementing this were largely thematic. It provides a strong visual indication of the player's progress, and the slow "industrialization" of his surroundings.
So, that's why I experimented with it initially, and I really liked what it did to my base with time:
Later, I realized it makes both base and road construction more interesting in that having small semi-permanent obstacles everywhere tends to shape a player's construction to adapt to the terrain. Bonus. Also, instead of stationary tree farming, I find it tends to encourage you to push out into the world to collect more wood, exploring, potentially getting into trouble, changing the landscape with your presence, building small bases and infrastructure, and having mini adventures along the way. Bonus again.
Ingredients for the remover I came up with afterwards. As always, I never add features to give ingredients a use, but I'm happy to make use of elements that require on after I've already decided on a feature.
However, I did intentionally choose ingredients that would make it difficult to remove stumps in large quantities, because otherwise, it would effectively remove the feature as a base design consideration / obstacle. The creeper oysters in the recipe ensure that you generally only have enough stump remover on hand for key areas of your construction projects (like the interior of my fort above and the roads leading off from it).
Hence why there's no tool to do it easily, as that would inevitably just result in people going OCD and removing every stump they come across. Late game you can always work on a mob trap using saws to produce high numbers of oysters. If you *really* need to remove a stump earlier on, you can of course just chop at for an extended period until it's gone. But overall, stump removal is intended to be a limited resource that the player is encouraged to think about before "wasting" on areas where it isn't really needed.
All told and after extended play with it (I've been sitting on that one for awhile now and playing with it in my own world), I think it's pretty much exactly where I want it. The only thing I've been thinking about changing is maybe adding a time delay on the remover use when I get around to it, so that the stumps sit and sizzle for awhile before being removed. That's largely just a visual thing though, so it hasn't been a priority for me.