Jafna

Jafna

Levelling with the hoe continues the flat ground it touches instead of chasing your

crosshair, and your Crafting skill decides how much ground one swing covers.

Jafna is Old Norse for to level, to make even.

Why

Flattening a large area with the hoe is miserable, and it is worth being precise about why,

because the obvious answer is wrong. It is not that the tool is small. It is that the tool has

no fixed idea of what height you are aiming for.

The hoe's Level ground eases every point under the tool toward the height of the placement

ghost, and the ghost sits wherever your crosshair last met the ground. So the reference height

follows the camera. Take one swing, walk two steps, take another, and the strip of ground both

swings covered is pulled toward two different heights. You cannot aim your way out of that,

because the thing moving is not your aim, it is the target. It is also why the ripples get

worse the more carefully you work around the edges: every correction is another swing at

another height.

Jafna gives the swing somewhere fixed to level to, and the game turns out to have been keeping

it all along. Every zone's terrain data carries a flag per grid point meaning "a terrain

operation has touched this", saved with the world and shared with everyone. So a swing can

look at the ground it is about to cover, find the parts of it a previous swing already

shaped, and use that height rather than your crosshair's. Flat spreads outward from wherever you started

it, at one height, and keeps spreading in your next session and under another player's hoe.

A swing that covers nothing you levelled before is left completely alone, which is how you

still start a new platform at a new height: stand clear of the old one and swing.

What it does

• A level swing continues the flat it touches. If it covers ground you already levelled,

it uses that height. If it covers none, it behaves exactly like vanilla.

• It refuses rather than guesses. Where two platforms at different heights meet under one

swing, it hands the decision back to your crosshair instead of averaging them into a ramp.

• You can hold a height. Press Left Alt to pin the one under your crosshair, and every

swing flattens toward it wherever you stand, until you press again.

• Low ground is raised with stone. When a swing wants the ground higher than the hoe can

lift it, that swing lifts its whole circle straight to your height and your pack pays for

what the hoe would not have done, at the rate the hoe's own Raise ground charges. It leaves a

step at the edge of the circle until you swing next to it. Like Raise ground, it needs a

workbench nearby.

• Reach grows with Crafting. Nothing below about Crafting 25, growing to a 6 metre radius

at Crafting 60 against the hoe's own 3. Never a discount: a swing costs exactly the stamina

vanilla charges.

• Only your own swing is changed. Ground shaped by anything else, a location, another mod,

a Devkit flatten or a player without Jafna, is shaped exactly as vanilla shapes it.

• A ward you cannot use blocks the whole swing, not just its centre.
• The build panel shows the numbers: the reach you have, the height the swing will use,

where that height came from, and what raising the low ground will cost.

• No new prefabs, items, recipes or saved values. A world played with Jafna is an ordinary

world, and the ground you shaped is ground vanilla's own operations shaped.

Holding a height

Continuing the flat answers "what height is this ground meant to be" from the ground itself.

That is right most of the time and certain none of the time, and two cases it cannot settle

turned up within an hour of playing: a higher platform beside you captures swings you are

aiming lower, and a swing crossing a zone boundary has each zone decide from its own half of

the footprint.

Both are the mod guessing at an intention you already have, so you can state it instead. With

a levelling tool out, press Left Alt and the height under your crossh