Mining has been important in this game for getting materials and voxel deformation of terrain is one of its special selling points and permits emergent gameplay. Every game playthrough I start with an underground base, it involves a lot of mining. The good stuff is the emergency tool mines reasonably well in that you have some control over the outcome. Also the resource drill for the next tier handheld is very effective which is good when you want to get stuff out of the way. There are a couple of reasons mining and underground building do not play well at the moment. Flattening is one problem. A couple of years ago flattening worked very well with the handheld tool. Now it is almost useless and more hazard then help. It does not flatten what you are pointing it at and makes caves way past it where you didnt want them. Also the obstruction to block placement by terrain does not play well. You used to be able to add a block to any visible facet of a placed block, this allowed integration of an underground base structure with the terrain so as not to leave gaps you can fall into. Now you have to clear away too much of the terrain to place a block so there is always a gap. This is not helped by the handheld tool which either makes too much of a hole or in fine mode does not take nearly enough and also creates weird spikes and divots in the terrain and the flattening tool cannot remedy these because it doesnt work properly as mentioned above and creates huge caves past the point you are aiming at and does not flatten the very thing you want it to flatten. The filler tool is also overpowered now and once you have used it, shaping the resulting lump is an exercise in frustration because of the above. All in all it is still very much a facepalm experience and not as good as what preceded it, which was nearly right but was a bit underpowered in places, like resource mining, which is about right now. It would be great if we could have the old flattening and filling back and simple block placement which allows building into the terrain but keep the current resource mining and work on developing better fine sculpting tools. If Astroneer can get it right then so can Empyrion. I am just asking, please raise the priority for getting the handheld mining right because IMHO, sincerely, it isnt and its an important aspect of the game.
The flattening mode worked wonderfully up until they made the mining changes in 10.0. Ever since then it's been nearly 100% useless. It no longer creates a perfectly flat plane like it used to and instead just does whatever it wants. It no longer tries to flatten to the nearest voxel the player is standing on and instead just creates bumps all over the place. As you also mentioned the fine mode on the drill creates those stupid spikes and is also useless now. I like how fast we can mine ever since 10.0, but ALL the other mining changes they did are absolutely terrible and need fixed. Mining and voxel deformation are such a large part of the game that it's really saddening with what they did to mining and flattening.
