Radical idea:

0x6A7232

After removing terraforming, add it back, but only to certain areas of terraformable dirt, placed on top of the normal non-terraforming terrain. This way you could limit the total amount of terraforming possible to manageable levels.
Probably only possible after v1.0, and then only after more optimization of the terraforming code.

Just a thought, I have no idea if this could possibly work.

scifiwriterguy

Well...if I read the terraformer explanation correctly, the problem was in how the 'former's changes were being saved. After every change, the game would re-save the cell affected, point-by-point. One or two edits weren't so bad, but the more you did, the more the savefile size just ballooned.

Now, the thing that occurs to me is that your idea allows for a completely different approach. Rather than saving changes to the geometry, you seem to be advocating using dirt "objects" that the terraformer would delete. The engine would only have to save the IDs of which dirt blocks had been removed, then not render them when the cell loads. The problem I see happening with that, though, is that I think each "dirt patch" would have to be hand-rendered to match the underlying terrain - otherwise, the nice, undulating sandy bottom starts getting all jaggy.

It's a good idea, don't get me wrong, and I like it. I just don't think it would be easy to implement at all.