4Game

Anyone that has built a big base has probably encountered the annoyance of having to litter multiple workbenches and stonecutters all over the place, trying to hide them, or destroying them once you've finished building. I'd like to propose a potential change to this system that not only removes the annoyance of having to create many crafting stations, but also rewards you for upgrading your station tiers.

Land Claiming

The buildable area, instead of being marked by a crafting station, would be marked by a craftable "land claim" object. It would be an invisible marker only visible while holding a hammer. This removes the clutter of having workbenches where you don't want them. Multiple Land Claims could be chained together to create a larger base. Optionally, to claim land near another player, that player would be prompted to give you permission to do so (alternatively, this could be done through the existing Ward object).

Crafting Stations

The objects you are allowed to create would still be limited by the availability of your crafting stations. However, instead of the crafting station itself having a buildable area around it, the nearby Land Claims would inherit the permissions of the crafting stations. A crafting station inside "claimed land" would provide its building permissions to not only that Land Claim, but to any chained/overlapping Land Claims. This way you can place a single workbench anywhere inside your claimed land, and the entirety of that base will have workbench building permissions. Note that separate bases in other parts of the map will still need their own crafting stations.

Station Tiers

As new buildable objects are added to the game, such as through the Hearth and Homes update, it would make sense that higher tier or more intricate building pieces are gated behind crafting station tiers. For instance, a tier 1 workbench allows you to craft thicket roofing, however perhaps a tier 3 workbench would be required to create wooden shingles. As before, the crafting station and all its tiers would propagate through all the claimed land in your base. Additionally, to place a limit on base size and reward players for unlocking new crafting tiers, the size of your claimed land could be gated by your total crafting station tier. The more crafting station upgrades you have, the more Land Claims you can chain together.

This is just the foundation for a new land claiming system and could potentially incorporate ideas such as changing the shape/boundary of claimed land, offering upgrades to increase both the horizontal and vertical area of claimed land, and interacting with with the Ward object to administrate build permissions for other players. Please let me know if this is something you'd like, what you might change, and how you might build on this idea!