A playtest screenshot showed fir trunks with a skirt of dirt standing out above the ground. The scanned firs were photographed on slopes, so the soil at their base rises 26 to 31 cm from one side to the other. The old placement could leave that edge up to 75 cm in the air.
The new rule measures each model’s real contact points and lowers the tree until every one of them is below the ground. Across 500 random placements, the worst case is buried by 0.7 cm. Grass now tilts with the slope as well. About 2 percent of trees next to terrain that has not loaded yet still use an approximation.
Swings that passed through trunks
The trees were not only sitting wrong. An 18 m fir’s trunk measures 7 to 16 cm from its center at a height of one meter, while its invisible collision cylinder was 30 cm, a stock size. In play the pickaxe also swung straight through trees, because mining traced a line from the camera and the tool itself had no collision.
The proposed fix sweeps the head and shaft of the tool along the swing, so the first solid thing stops it. A first set of tests for tools being blocked by the world went into the development build that night.
