building with rock naturally fixes a lot of this problem. Rock is thick enough that the terrain clipping is contained inside the wall, if done carefully. A second wall thickness can be added if necessary.
you can also cover holes with tiles; at the top of a raised ring or square, I often have a little gap between the building and the terrain wall, and I just put down stone floor tiles over it.

if your raised terrain is of any height at all, it will ALWAYS be some sort of near pyramid slope that while fairly upright and straight, will never be perfectly so. That means if you build say a wood wall that does not clip into it at the bottom, it will have a gap at the top. If you clip at the bottom, you can close the gap, again easier with stone but you can make a 3 or 4 wall thick wood build too. At the end of the day, make it look right is going to take some unnecessary filler or cover up but it can be done if you want to do so.

You have one issue or the other in my experience. You can cover up the clipped earth with wooden or stone floor tiles. If the clipping is excessive and protrudes from stone or wooden floor tiles in an interior space where you don't want it for the aesthetics you can cover it with red jute carpet and hide the clipped earth. Having the hole is more of an issue than having the earth clipping through for my playstyle.

Originally posted by AzureTheGamerKobold:

Is there some way to get the ground to be flush around your building? so that lower half is under ground and the upper half is exposed and it not have a huge hole around the outside of the building.

Fiddled and fiddled but it seems like if you raise the ground around the outer wall the earth will always clip through the wall. If you try to then get rid of the clipped area then it removes the whole raised section meaning you will ALWAYS have this area around your building thats a big hole.

Does anyone know if there is a way to raise the ground and keep it from clipping through your building? or is this just a limit of the engine?

Haven't found a way to fix it, but what I generally do is the following:

- Raise earth in such a way it overlaps the building area (before anything is built)
- use the pickaxe and hoe to create a clean edge
- build into the earth

It is still tricky, but this way you can get it to look somewhat decent. Still, I would dearly like a shovel or something that allows one to fill up small holes. Raise earth is a bit too much of a good thing sometimes and it behaves in a weird fashion sometimes.

No, because of how terrain is modeled. The ground is a Surface - as in 3D modelling - with a 2D heightmap specifying the elevation of each point of a 1m x 1m "block" of land. Because of this, every level of land will always have a 1m wide "slope" around/next to it - the grade created by one side of the block being at one elevation and the other side being at another, with the two sides being 1m apart from each other on a map view.

The best you can do is make your constructions such that they "fill" that border slope. Building with stone can do it easily, since stone building parts are all 1m thick and the borders are all 1m wide. Basically, the stone clips through and makes it look like it was dug flush.

If building with wood and this bothers you: raised floors is the easy solution. Use half height poles as piles. If the gap under wooden bits placed on ground is too much but raising ground is too high, try placing a half height piece and snapping a full height next to it and down - now you have half height off the ground with no ground/wall gap. EDIT: another (wood wasting) trick is to edge the bottom of you walls with beams. That should also fill in the wall/floor gap.