Trash cleanup won't work with voxels?

Erik ●

I adjusted the interval to 30 mins and 10 meters, ensuring it was on, and after 24 hours still nothing. I will have to keep the map set to safe instead of normal now because craters are accumulating.

Edit: Any help on this would be appreciated, it seems as though the only solution for clearing/cleaning/resetting/ voxels beyond the in game interface, SEToolbox, has been officially dead since the economy update.

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Frigidman ●

We were trying to clean up our world around our base (thousands of meteor hits are causing serious load times now)... we tried all manner of settings with this, and it seems like there is some built-in unchangeable behavior. We tried setting distance from grids to 0.01 (the lowest the server terminal would allow), and 1, and 10... nothing would allow it to clear up around the base. Pockmark would stay within 1km of the base grids.

So we tried "0" for distance to grid, and suddenly ALL voxel changes cleaned up, everything. Even tunnels on grids and the sort (it was overkill obviously).

We cant find a happy medium of 'clean up outside 50meters from grids or such' (which would allow tunnels, and hangars and mining pits etc).

Unsure if this is just a broken mechanic, or there settings that we cant change that its forcing ON regardless.

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K.Hunter ●

I think it really is just broken... We're experiencing the same issue exactly as you described it. However, I did notice a weird thing a few weeks ago when tinkering with all this. We had old voxel files from backups. So I decided to replace the current voxel file for Earth-like with an old one that included most of the voxel modifications needed for our semi-underground base. After doing that, I was surprised to see that the voxel cleanup parameters also started working as expected (it was able to cleanup 25-50m away when I set it up that way).

But it seems that only lasted for a short while, because fast forward a few weeks, our voxel file has grown too large again, so I wanted to do a cleanup today and it looks like it's gone back to behaving how you described it. Even though I now managed to halve the voxel file size after the cleanup I just did (so it managed to clean up some stuff somewhere on the planet...), the file is still pretty big and does cause a few minutes of streaming when you join the server. It definitely didn't clean up anywhere near 10 metres away from our grids when I set it that way. There's still craters within 1-2km out. It just seems to clean up whatever it wants... I have a feeling the voxel cleanup just borks out when your voxel file goes over a certain size and stops behaving as expected. If only we got someone from Keen to comment on this....

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Frigidman ●

Actually what we finally figured out, and are doing now is (keep in mind, we are both admins of the server and the only two players):

One of us enables "Creative Tools" in the admin panel for themself (as well as invulnerable so we can use jetpack consistently during this operation as you really need to stay flying high).

Adds the 'ball' voxel hand to toolbar to use. Select it.

Open up the voxel tool editor (H I think by default).

Set "project to voxel", "grid snap off", and a voxel size > 25m (it has to be 20m or larger to work).

Now, the fun part. Fly up and aim at the ground. The voxel tool show be projecting outward and following the ground as a HUGE ball.

Hold "ctrl" and "right click" on a dent or crater area. You should see it vanish, or show a sharp ridge of dirt through it. Just repeat on the other side to get the whole thing.

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So, what you are seeing is that with a large enough voxel tool size (>20m), you can now selectively reset each "voxel cube of landscape". These are VERY BIG cubes, thus needing a wide tool that covers enough of it to trigger a "Voxel Reset" (what ctrl-RMB does).

Depending how deep a tunnel or base digout is, you may even get away with cleaning the surface above as the 'voxel cube' does not reach far enough down for your tunnel/area. We have such on our Mars base, so we were able to clean the mountainside of meteor holes, while keeping our hangars and access tunnels all clear of reset dirt.

One gotcha is if you fly high enough and set the voxel tool size to 100m to do mass cleaning (which I did to clear about 1000 meteor hits further out around the base)... is if you 'aim out further than your current sector', it will error at you about out of bounds. Just fly over to where the tool shows up again, and then recommence sweeping.

These 'voxel cube group sectors' are large, about the size of what the voxel cleanup is failing to do. Almost like the voxel cleanup looks at a sector (which is about 1.5-2km), and if it sees any grid inside that sector, it decides to do NO cleanup, even if the grid is small and off in a corner of it. Our base happened to rest over the border of two sectors, so it was not auto-cleaning either sector.

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Anyhow..... thats what we do now. After awhile of serious damage, one of us flies up in admin mode with a voxel tool and resets selective voxel areas with ctrl-RMB. We managed to clear out 12 MB of voxel crap just around our base on the first pass, greatly reducing stream-in times.