Originally posted by OctoberSky:

Using the hoe to raise ground will cost 2 stone for each application and the game engine currently limits a pillar to 10 such applications although I will waste at least one use of the hoe at the very top to insure I get a square surface there. Unfortunately the game engine will cost you 2 stone even if the pillar grows no further so players should keep some level of count as they use the hoe in raising ground. The base of a terrain pillar is 1.5 of the split rail fence pieces so if a player lays out dimensions of 18x18 fences they will get 12 such pillars on each side of a plateau. This should result in use of 2880 stone rather than 8000 stone that I noted earlier so my play experiment likely used more with inefficient use of the hoe. As blprice61 notes, you can get much more mileage if you make a sparse matrix of pillars and interconnect them with beams of some vintage. In any case, terrain columns or terrain plateaus give the player a fairly safe platform to build homes, farms or foundry bases upon.

To refine this, I spent many hours running experiments with the Hoe in preparation for building a berm (earthen wall) around the main base on my play group's first map to get a good understanding of how it works. These experiments were done on a private local map in vanilla - no mods.

Raise Ground will raise the terrain by 1m per use, to a maximum of 8m above the originally generated level. It primarily affects a 2m x 2m [1 standard 2m floor piece, wall piece, roundpole fence piece, or stake wall piece], world-grid-aligned [1m per grid line resolution] square area, with a secondary area of a 1m wide bordering slope zone, for a total effect zone of 4m x 4m. The Hoe is not analog in precision like the Hammer can be. Where you point on the ground simply determines which grid square corner the operation is centered from (the one closest to the cursor).

If you're making your berm out of pillars - with no ground-level gaps - rather than a solid face, then their centers should be spaced 4m [2 standard large floor pieces, wall pieces, roundpole fence pieces, or stake wall pieces] apart.