this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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i think the comment was more on how they started designing the game with terraformning as a central conceit and a randomly-generated voxel world, then scrapped all that when it was too late to pull it out of the game. so the world is still procedural and fully destructible, but the random seed is static and there is nothing left in the game that damages terrain.
I think placing base foundations still flattens nearby terrain? But yeah, the devs admitted that the destructible terrain was a huge mistake that caused massive pop-in and performance losses, even now after they dialed it down to nearly zero.
They couldn't just remove voxel terrain entirely because the world is a mishmash of voxel and classic geometry. The voxel destruction/deformation only applied to the sand and soil on the ocean floor, which let players dig several feet down before hitting solid terrain. Most other terrain features are static props.
They'd have had to redo nearly the entire terrain to remake it as a traditional polygonal mesh, so instead they simply removed the player's dig prompt and the terraformer item. I think there's even a console command to re-enable everything? There was at some point during Early Access, at least.
I don't recall them ever saying anything about randomly generated worlds though. It's been bespoke since the very first alpha, though a lot of first-time players thought it was procgen due to the random spawn locations.
when i first tried it, the plan which they had just scrapped was to have the biomes and general features be static but the details be procedural. so the skin of each part of the map was changeable. this was after the seamoth but long before the cyclops, when all the upgrade parts were untextured safes and all the biomes had not been added yet. there was one corner of the map that was just flat.
at that point they still had terraforming stuff. in fact that's how i first explored the big hollow trunk in the plate coral forest biome: i blew the top off. i don't remember if i went there right after the update that added the biome or had to wait for a month, because at some point in the development you couldn't even look at that part of the map without fps dropping down to fractions. i think they forgot to use instancing so each model used its own drawcall, and there are thousands of them in that area.