[2020] Regarding wall climbing.

The real problem with limiting the height to which an entity can climb is that it makes building tall structures very, very annoying and difficult. Imagine trying to build ladders just to make something simple that's more than one block high. That being said, we have a feature planned which lets you smooth blocks. The idea here is that you'd smooth your walls making them unclimbable. We'll see how well that works in practice. Could be it's super unclear/confusing and also annoying. Thoughts?

Sometimes we have to avoid realism if it makes the game annoying to play. Placing scaffolding and ladders is a real pain as you build and, for me at least, doesn't add much to the experience by being more realistic.
A good analogy would be how much people hate manually planting and harvesting crops. I added the farm room to automate this and will be adding the arboretum to automate tree planting/logging. If people hated the process of planting/harvesting, I truly don't see them enjoying the experience of placing scaffolds.
Auto-placing scaffolds doesn't seem like a great option either. It would slow down building a lot as every level they'd have to go they would need to build the scaffolds first. And then what, they have to remove them after? Does the player? How would the AI even know when to remove it? Then it introduces the 'realism' question of, oh, my settlers can place scaffolds to move around when building, why don't they just do that all the time? Why do I need to even put ladders/stairs down?