Heh. Today I went in to work thinking "I'll learn LUA, then maybe I can contribute more than ideas to that hammer thing." Nope, already done. :) I played around with it a bit and have a few suggestions, though.
* It'd be nice if the hammer made the same thunking noise as the pick did, and ideally if it had the same sort of gradual effect as the pick where you apply the animated cracking before the stone actually yields. It feels sort of like a magic wand right now.
* I kept having trouble with the final "destroy the node completely" step for the ladder/foothold modes, it was tricky keeping a continuous ladder or foothold path running for long without accidentally destroying a chunk and having to switch out of the hammer to fill it back in again. I'm not sure what circumstances I'd actually want that in, frankly. If I want nodes gone entirely the pick already does that job and gives me building materials in the process.
* The ladder and foothold modes produce basically the same result with only cosmetic differences. How about instead making it so the "ladder" mode works as it does now, creating a stone ladder in a shaft that can line up with the default wooden ladder, but the "foothold" mode produces the footholds on the *first* strike and doesn't excavate most of the target node. That way you'd have different use cases for the two - the foothold mode is for scaling an existing cliff or wall without digging a big trench through it in the process, and the ladder mode is for digging one-node-wide vertical shafts you can climb back up out of. Or does that not work with how ladders function? Do you need to be inside the same node as the ladder to make use of it? It seems like I can climb a ladder while not being entirely inside its node, so perhaps giving the foothold version a slight indent will work. It'll also make it easier to fall off of the foothold version, balancing out the speed with which it can be carved relative to the ladder.
All those quibbles aside, though, this is an excellent cave-exploration tool. Thanks. :)