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'''Flattening''' is the [[digging]] process of making a [[tile]] flat. A tile is considered flat when all four corners of the tile are of the same height, which can be seen by examining tile borders. If all 4 borders around a tile are reported as "level", the tile is flat.

You can go about flattening a tile using 2 methods: manual and automatic. While "automatic" sounds nice, it's actually quite a bit more complicated to get right than doing it manually until you get the hang of it.

The automatic way is to use the '''Flatten''' command by right-clicking on a tile with your [[shovel]] activated. If the tile is too steep to stand on, you can still use flatten successfully from an adjacent tile.

In a nutshell, the flatten command takes dirt from high corners and and puts them on lower ones than the calculated average from the server zero-plane. The zero-plane is the lowest point possible in wurm, where digging further would result in you falling through the world. This plane is absolutely flat, and all dirt and rock heights are calculated from this plane by means of simple addition. This sounds a bit abstract, I know, but read on and all will be explained.

Imagine that you are on the continent of flatland on flatten flats. This imaginary land has no slopes whatsoever, anywhere, and no water. You are standing in the middle of one tile in this land with a cart containing 40 dirts.You walk over to one of the 4 corners on that tile and drops 10 dirt on it from the cart. It now has a height of 10 dirt. Next, you repeat the procedure on the other 3 corners and suddenly you have a tile that is elevated 10 dirts above the rest of flatland. The height of each corner is 10.

But you realize that doing this was retarded, and want the tile flat again. You ''could'' just dig up the extra 5 dirt from corner 3 again and drop them on corner 1 and it would be taken care of, but instead of that you position yourself on the tile and select "flatten".

What the game now does is calculate the height of your tile's corners based off the absolute zero plane of the game, in the example above the zero plane is the continent of flatland, so... 5+10+15+10=40. Divide that by 4 corners and you get, surprise, 10! So, the game now knows that the target height for the 4 corners is 10 dirts each, and begins to gradually take dirt from those corners ''above'' the target height and put it on the corners ''below'' it. It will continue to do this until one of the following conditions are met upon which it will stop:

If the flattening action successfully flattened the tile completely, the message "The ground is flat here." will be displayed. If this message is not displayed, you either failed to perform an assemble or fill, or it was a 0-0-0-2 spread.

The action time is based on the height difference in "dirts" between the highest and lowest corners of the tile. The time is 9 seconds plus an additional 10 seconds for every 4 dirts difference. Examples:

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Manual flattening is the act of making an area flat through manually [[digging]] and dropping [[dirt]]. While the process requires more interaction by the digger, it is vastly superior when flattening large areas of land.

# Pick a single corner as your reference (you could place a [[small barrel]] or another [[container]] on it so you know the reference corner if you wish).

# Once the tile border reports "level", walk over to the corner you've adjusted and use it as your new reference corner. Since the level between it and your old reference corner is level, they're at the same height. Now look for a new slope to adjust and repeat the procedure as before.

Understand that the world is made up of pillars, and that the tiles are merely thin textures stretched out from the pillar's highest points. When you dig or drop dirt, all you do is adjust the height of the pillar (ie, a corner) you are standing nearest. When digging, all that matters are the corners. Tiles only matter when you use the "flatten" command, in which case the selected tile only decides which 4 corners (or pillars) should be compared to eachother and adjusted. Otherwise, ''forget about the tiles, only think about the corners''. Also, never forget that when digging and dropping dirt, it doesn't matter where you click, '''only where your feet are located'''.

The limitations of manual flattening is, of course, that it may take more time and interaction to complete, and also is subject to dirt flow. Dirt flow is what happens when you try to drop dirt on a corner with a slope diagonally that exceeds 40 in steepness (For example: You're dropping dirt northeast, then slopes N+W or E+S shouldn't be higher then 40 together). When using the "flatten" command, dirt flow ''does not apply'' and you can use it to create extreme slopes by the use of a technique known as [[Guides/FlatRaising|flatraising]]

When flattening stand on the lowest corner. Standing on the higher ones might get you some fall damage and that stops the flattening timer to prevent you dying from it.