D&D Mold Earth Cantrip, Story Maker or Breaker?

I’d like to talk about the Mold Earth cantrip from 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Along with its other elemental cousin cantrips, Mold Earth is something of an odd-ball.  This comes down to a few factors:

• Cantrips can be cast repeatedly without spell slots. The real limitation to cantrips is time and opportunity.
• Some effects of Mold Earth are permanent.
• Move Earth’s targets are common in most game settings; loose earth and stone (for some effects).

If you target an area of loose earth (5′ cube per 1 action / 6 seconds), you can instantaneously excavate it, move it along the ground, and deposit it up to 5 feet away. This movement doesn’t involve enough force to cause damage.

You cause shapes, colors, or both to appear on the dirt or stone, spelling out words, creating images, or shaping patterns. The changes last for 1 hour.

There are a lot of factors that complicate calculating how much earth a person can move “in the real world”… soil conditions, digger strength/endurance/experience, equipment type/quality, weather/daylight, breaks/rests, etc but Mold Earth is still wildly more efficient than even the most optimal manual cases. It fact, it is on par with some mechanized excavating machines!

Mitigating Factors:

• Sage Advice rather curtly helps with the “loose earth” vagueness with “Think dirt, not stone.”  I think this could be a bit more expansive, but I’ll take what I can… I interpret this to mean almost all dirt/earth/soil areas, but not adobe, mud brick, rubble in-filled walls, or heavily-vegetated ground such as the base of a very large tree (though I believe grass, shrub and undergrowth areas would be fine).
• When moving earth, you must be able to see the area you wish to affect (30′ range). This means, you can’t undermine an area entirely covered in stone or other substances, like a courtyard, paved road, many interior floors and walls, stone-lined passages and shafts, etc.  You could work to/under those area eventually from an exposed area.
• Mold Earth is pretty darn sneaky.  The only component is Somatic, making its casting silent. However, the effects of lifting and dumping 125 cubic feet and dumping it 5′ feet away are probably not. Still sneakier than a crew of laborers, though.
• Fantasy/magical world factors aside, “dirt” depth varies wildly depending on geography.  Maybe 5-30′ of soil and clay/sand, then rocks/boulders, and finally bedrock depending on your area. This may makes that 200′, maximum-damage, murder pit trap unfeasible in many, if not all, areas.
• Mold Earth‘s excavation effect can only move a 5′ cube of earth, 5′ in any distance.  As long as your dirt cube remains, at least somewhat, in contact with the ground, this limits you to laterally and diagonally squares (including adjacent up/down), and straight up just once.  This means that when digging a shaft downwards, after the first 5′, the cube is only lifted up 5’ (into the empty, previously excavated space) before falling back down.  In order to dig further straight down you would need to do some ramping/terracing (think Minecraft). You can back-fill that area afterwards but that brings up another issue…
• Holes in unstable material tend to collapse unless supported.  Engineers call this an excavation slope and safe/stable angles vary greatly, but with no support whatsoever, a 5′ shaft straight down is a good generic figure.   Perhaps more for heavier earth and clay, less for sand or mud.  Packing the earth could help  but at some point, timbers and other measures will be necessary.
• And then there is the water table.  This could be just a couple feet down in areas on the border of a body of water or swampy ground, or it could be hundreds of feet.  Once you reach it, however, your excavated area will begin to fill with water (and become unstable in some cases). Even if emptied or evaporated, they will typically refill from the surrounding ground.
• The creating “shapes and patterns” on the stone aspect of this cantrip is also a little vague. I lean conservatively and imagine fresco, relief carvings and engravings. Certainly not cutting stone blocks, sculpting statuary, and the like.

Useful Applications:

So all that aside, what can you still do that is “legit”?  Quite a lot, actually…

• Quickly bury things laying on the ground by moving a 5′ cube of earth upwards. Items fall to the bottom of the pit and the unsupported earth falls back on top of them. This takes 1 action by the caster, but could take an hour or more for a person with a shovel to recover them. Even with another casting of Mold Earth, it could take a few Actions… excavate hole, jump in, retrieve items, jump out. Coordinated with a disarming maneuver or on hastily dropped discarded items, this could be devastating.
• Build a one-person trench each casting, or trench lines with successive castings (up to 3/4 cover for a +5 bonus to AC and Dexterity saving throws).
• Build up enormous defensive earth works (or destroy those of an enemy).
• Creating emergency shelters in the ground.
• Convince people that a giant, slow moving gopher is burrowing around the area by shuffling your mound of dirt along the surface. 😉
• Create even nastier difficult terrain.  If you have time to prepare beforehand, create difficult terrain AND uncover previously hidden caltrops… because the two stack.
• Roughly conceal tracks of people, creatures or vehicles.  It will still be pretty obvious that something happened in the area, but probably obliterates the chance to find out who, what, how many, etc.  Alternately, you can create tracks though this might require a Survival check to make them convincing.
• Extinguish a small or medium fire on the ground.
• Free a wagon stuck in a rut or mud.
• Roll logs along by creating a small mobile hill underneath them and letting gravity roll them forward.
• Creating small, shallow channels on a stone floor to direct water or drain an area.
• Create or remove underwater obstacles for ships such as sandbars, silt dredging, etc.
• Dam, divert or clear the flow of water in bodies that are cutting through soft bottom bodies.
• Digging or exhuming graves.  Empty a vampire’s coffin of its earth (if your vampires roll that way).
• Agricultural works, such as plowing a field, digging irrigation, sowing and area quickly, harvesting underground crops such as peanuts and potatoes. Remove tree stumps and boulders by excavating around them to prepare a field.
• Create stone carvings, messages, pictures, maps, etc complete with color.  Pull a “Road Runner” and draw a door, tunnel or passage over a solid wall. Create a small object on the ground surface.
• Create/copy a stamp or seal for making impressions on documents, letters and envelopes. Might also require a skill check.
• Slightly alter the framing of doors and other portals set in stone to make them un-openable or un-closeable.
• Clean an area of dust, dirt and mud.
• Purify a pool or container of muddy water (lift the dirt, leaving just the water behind).
• Undermine buildings and structures with enough time and access.
• Move earth/dirt through a mesh to filter out objects (fast archeology or prospecting!).
• Quickly create print and image “plates” on a stone slab for printing on paper.
• Create molds on a stone surface for casting (wax, metal, soap, etc).
• Create a water well by sinking a shaft into ground where the water table is reasonably close to the surface
• Transmute Rock to Mud, shape with Mold Earth and after 1 hour your creations become permanent stone.
• Dislodge pitons, spike and other fixtures embedded in stone (if not too deep). Conversely make or improve the fittings for such things.  Shape a ring/hook in stone to fasten ropes to.  Create small hand/foot holds… as you climb!
• Temporarily mark, etch or facet a gemstone. Change their color/clarity for an hour, which  might make them appear more or less value as desired.
• Create an earthen ramp to get over walls. Fill in pits and chasms with enough time.
• Building an engine… by moving 125 square feet of earth into and out of of an open sided bucket/scoop, mounted on a lever arm, you generate an enormous mechanical force  (5 tons weight or more per “stroke”) which could drive all manner of devices directly or be converted in radial motion for more complex/versatile applications…  industrial scale hammermills and presses, grinding mills, pumps/pistons, clockworks, drill/boring, blast furnace bellow, construction lifts/cranes, etc.

And don’t even get me started on Shape Water.  😉

Side-Note on Game Play Style:

I have often gotten tagged as a “power gamer” and even a “mix maxer” but in my defense, my goal is always to create a signature effect or character concept in games.  I think there is an important, and often underappreciated distinction that applies to many like-minded players. If the goal is simply to “break” or dominate a game to exclusion of the fun of the Gamemaster and other players, then you’re just being a jerk. No further labels or distinctions are necessary.  But conversely, slapping broad, derisive labels on players that play differently is style shaming.

When playing in roleplaying games, I’m instantly attracted to resources that do more than simply apply some dice to one roll or another.  Some people call these sorts of abilities “utilitarian”.  I enjoy how these often overlooked abilities allow a player to participate in shaping the story and setting on a whole other level than simply damaging foes or manipulating the mathematics of dice rolls; altering the landscape (sometimes literally) of the story.

What can you do when you think you might be abusing some nifty application of an ability or rule?

1. Consider if you’d like to be on the receiving end of this (either as a Gamemaster in your own game or from an NPC in the game you play in).
2. If you detect tension, talk to your Gamemaster. Ask them if they feel what you are doing undermines the game. Ask for alternatives.
3. Police your own behavior. What might seem neat, can quickly become an annoying cliche. Personally, I try not to pull the same gimmick more than once or twice a session, and try to keep the total number of gimmicks limited as well; saving them for dramatic moments or using them “off screen” if applicable.