I know about standing in 1 spot and raising, but raising costs a lot of stone and even standing in 1 spot unless you find a near perfectly flat area you need to deal with the limitations on how much it can be flattened. Most of the time the best you'll find is a gentle slope, or area that is open with lots of mini hills you then need to mine down a bit, and raise other bits up to so you don't hit the limit of how far you can manipulate the land.

The current tools work ok for small builds, but if you want to build a small village you either need to accept it being very spread out and put on small plots of land, or you search for a mostly flat area and spend hours flattening it enough.

Don't get me wrong I still love the game, but damn I wish it was easier to prepare land for building.