I am not sure what the bucket does. But I do know that if I do not pick enough pixels, loam won't be built. I always use two buckets to build loam, fill both and queue two pieces. Then either one or two pieces are built (depending on what the random pixel god found in water barrel+earth bucket) and I refill both buckets. If nothing is built, I refill the water. It's always a guessing game.

A newbie who tries to figure out how to build loam has a high chance of failing this (e.g. water barrel or earth bucket not full) and will have no idea what went wrong. It's also completely unnecessery to make loam building so complicated, because both earth and water are typically available in abundance. You just don't get them into the foundry.

If the containers automatically emptied themselves into the foundry and there were an easy way to see how many pieces of loam I could build with the current materials, that would be an incredible improvement.

Yes, that's more or less the same problem right now. But when we talk about display, we might just make it show pixels instead of something else we get rounding issues with.

From a players point of view, I have to say, I hate the bucket, too. But here's the thing: The barrel works the same way as the bucket does, yet nobody complains about the barrel. The reason for that, I think is, that you always get a reasonable amount of water with the barrel. Plus you see pretty good ingame how much water is extracted from the landscape.

The problem with the bucket is that you don't know how much earth it picked up after you used it. It makes an irregular shape of tunnel into the landscape wich makes it hard to know how much earth you have picked up. Especially when you are mining earth in a cave, wich is 99% the case. I often take in only ONE PIXEL and didn't realize it.

So the problem with the bucket is not the way the contents are measured, but how you obtain them. Having the contents show up as items instead of pixels doesn't change the fact that mining with the bucket is still a pain. You'd just get 1 or none earth-items into the bucket, instead of getting 1 or 2 pixels on your first try.

You could show the buckets contents either as items, or pixels, but you'd still have to probaby try several times until you get it full. So I see really no downsides in showing contents as pixels. I see more downsides with an item based approach, thoght. Like Clonko said, rounding errors. CR had that problem, that sometimes you'd get an earth object from 1 pixel earth, bacause you digged away some earth before. Showing pixels has the advantage, that you know what you have, it doesn't change, and you can't exploit it.

At this point I'd just thro out the bucket from the game (also because in minecraft bucket holds liquids, not dirt).

We could instead put clay items directly into the earth. Just a few, so you don't get spammed. They could even be very rare and big and carry-heavy. But you'd get like 5 loam out of one. It would make a positive expierience for the player to find a clay-item.

No effect was not a script error, has this keyword been introduced recently? I always though it was a proplist.

What about just LeftControl?

@Coal: Wasn't there a blit mode next to additive that effectively made the object brighter? GFX_BLIT_Mod2
@Particles: How about removing the glitter (imo this kind of fect should be used only for "ingame" effects, not menu selections) and adding this short light flash again? The flash made the newly selected object "pop up" better

Also, to further make it clear that it is just a selection the player is doing, perhaps highlight both the particle (flash) and the overlay in a certain common color - best the same color that is used for selections in menus. I'd suggest "light bluish" because it is a color that is well different from the rest of the colors in the game so it is clear to the user that the light/effects he sees there is nothing "ingame" but just a selection. (Not glow worms, not signifying that the item is worth very much and also not a light source)