but seriously, a turtle who can dig up would be incredible, I wouldnt miss so many dang chests for going to fast, or cause i couldnt see them. since a flying turtle is out the question, how about a mining turtle
as longs as theres a block above him, he can mine up, and falls if he runs into air, I dont know how balance it would be, but it be a nice mechanic. might be dificult to have to code all that for a turtle though...
That's such a fun and creative idea, I'd love to implement a turtle with that skill as well. Unfortunately, here comes the sad part, digging upward isn't possible due to a technical limitation that's pretty deeply baked in.
To keep the game running smoothly, the cells outside your current viewport are permanently pruned (basically removed) to free up memory. Without that system, once you dig past a certain depth, around 30 or so, the game starts to lag badly, and it only gets worse from there until your browser eventually crashes. So the game is just not built to support storing information on so many cells at once. Still, I really love the idea :)
Then what about that turtle can dig up, but the camera don't follow up so you can just go in the visible cells above? And if it is not powerful enough, some other power along with swapping tile instead of digging, so it explains why he doesn't fall after digging because he doesn't let an already dig trail?
When I saw the flying turtle Caelo I tought that digging up would be his power. ^^ I also tried to click the clouds at the start as I searched how to unlock him, given his update description. I expected maybe a turtle-shaped cloud then... I wonder if I am the only one who tried that. ^^"
That could work, but it would require quite a bit of rework on the game engine. Right now, turtles are always camera-centered vertically, except when they first spawn. A lot of mechanics rely on that, like falling sand physics and ice sliding, so changing it would introduce new bugs and require a good chunk of reworking. But technically, yeah, it's possible.
As for swapping positions with another cell, if it's on the same row as the turtle, that's more feasible and would involve fewer engine changes. But once we go into vertical swaps, we're back to the same complexity as digging upward.
That said, I'll keep this kind of effect in mind for future turtles. For now, Nix is planned as the final turtle, at least until the game hits a more stable 1.0 state.
As for Caelo, he's always meant to be floaty, but not quite flying. I've always seen him as this goofy, slightly clueless angel turtle. The clouds could work well as a little Easter egg in the future. I once had this idea of cow-shaped clouds spawning after cows were defeated, but it ended up feeling more disturbing than funny, so I scrapped it.
