Off topic, but the post mentions needing terrain manipulation for resource gathering.<p>I always thought animal crossing had a clever and efficient approach to this without any terrain manipulation. You can chop a tree, and it'll dispense logs, but only so many before it essentially has a cooldown. You get the feedback and the finite resources, without expensive terrain manipulation.<p>Of course that doesn't work for every game, and really works better on smaller maps, but something worth considering. Terrain manipulation is pretty expensive, if your game doesn't need it it's probably better to do without (again, a generalisation)