v1.6.0.0 — Layers everywhere, the target height becomes a tool, Portuguese

Video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR0h1_S8oHc — 29 minutes, from installation to the dozer, with subtitles in English, German, French, Polish, Italian and Portuguese.

You no longer need to draw an area. Until now a TerraFarm polygon had to exist and be assigned to your machine before anything happened at all — the single most common reason people concluded the mod was not working. Layers now apply anywhere on the map: the surface reference grid from 1.5.0 freezes the height of the undisturbed ground the first time a bucket touches a spot, so the boundaries follow the terrain without a fixed height being written anywhere.

Set it on the layers page: target "Everywhere (no area needed)" → Mining Layers → save. A fresh install has it on. An existing installation keeps its behaviour until you flip it — an update should not change a running game. Switching it back off keeps your layers instead of discarding them.

A drawn area still wins wherever one is assigned, and both deliberate exits are unchanged: an area set to enabled="false" and an area with a hand-set material get no layers. Building sites and pipe trenches stay clean with the global mode on.

The target height becomes a tool. Level a pad at ground level, cut a berm halfway up the pit wall, grade a ramp at a fixed slope — the dozer holds that line now instead of digging through it. This was impossible before, because the mod pulled the height down by itself whenever it sat near ground level. Reported by TacticalOreo: "it was digging to china when i set the height. I was making a pad but it was not paying attention to the target height."

autoTargetHeight is off by default from now on, and existing installations get it switched off once with a line in the log saying why. Where your target height cuts off the lowest layer, the mod says so and leaves the decision to you. Want the old behaviour back? Set autoTargetHeight="true". Step 9 in the README shows the whole thing with a dozer.

⚠️ A freeze that reached you without you changing anything

With the bucket rammed deep into the ground or working against a steep wall, the mod threw a Lua error every frame: the log grew by ~10,000 lines per second, FS25 climbed to ~215% CPU, and the game had to be killed from outside. This affected 1.4.3.0 and 1.5.0.0. The setting behind it, freeDumpHeight, is on by default.

Cause: TerraFarm guards ground-dumping twice — once for the bucket being inside the ground, once for the 0.5 m height check. We meant to lift only the height check and lifted both. Verified A/B/A/B on the same machine against the same wall: three freezes with the guard removed, zero errors across 3,825 log lines with it restored, including a deliberate ram.

Staying on an older version? Set freeDumpHeight="false" in miningLayers.xml.

Portuguese — thank you, Alicopower

Portuguese (pt) and Brazilian Portuguese (br), contributed by Alicopower in issue #7. Mod page, layer editor and map report now speak seven languages.

Slot diagnosis with your map's real numbers

The startup report states how many ground slots your map has, how many are taken and how wide its channel is: "This map has 63 ground slots (6 channels) — 63 in use." Both numbers are read from the running game. When they are full, the mod says so — that is the actual cause behind material that digs and sells but will not tip back onto the ground. Measured on two maps: a 6-channel map at 63 of 63 with three mining materials rejected, a 7-channel map at 83 of 127 with none.

Also fixed

• Switching off a named area no longer wipes its layers. Switch it back on and your setup is still there. The global target always behaved that way — the identical switch in the identical menu had two different outcomes.
• A disabled global zone no longer vanishes from your configuration on the next save.
• The depth display no longer goes quiet outside a drawn area, and no layer is guessed before the ground has been touched — on a spoil pile or someone else's pit edge it says the reference height is not set yet.
• The display no longer prints globalZone at you. It shows the word the editor uses: Zone: Everywhere Layer: DIRT.
• "TerraFarm decides: the map's material" was wrong. The normal case is the material set on your machine; the map's own takes over only when the map ships resources and map resources are on both globally and on the machine.
• A refusal to dump now prints what the startup check said about that same material, fill type index included, and states plainly whether the two agree. Where they disagree, the log calls it a bug in this mod instead of blaming your map.
• The yellow scope line under the editor, the "no input area" message and the disabled-zone wording all told half-truths about the new target. All corrected, in all seven languages.

Requirements

TerraFarm by scfmod (GitHub only — keep the folder named FS25_0_TerraFarm) and at least one machine with a TerraFarm configuration. PC/Mac only, script mods do not run on consoles.

Full detail in the changelog.