Oh, that shovel script, again. That should really have a big flag with red letters BROKEN on it:
Really, MoscowModder, or one of the Script DB staff should annotate it, because anybody who uses it as-is will run into trouble. I'm pretty sure it does things that are deprecated from ZScript now too.
In short, it hasn't worked for a very long time, and I'm pretty sure that it was always missing something as it was posted either without code tags, or before PZC had code tags. It has never been patched, but it's actually pretty simple to create that kind of effect. In fact, I have full libraries that can do exactly that, without all the mess. The trick, is that they aren't documented, so using them from the perspective of a novice, might be tedious, or difficult.
What happens, is essentially this:
A global function is always reading the combos on the screen, looking for combos with specific IDs (any kind of soft soil, and so forth). This is very useful, as it doesn't waste a script flag.
If collision occurs between a specific item, and a combo of the right type, it advances the combo one, just like a 'slash->next' type. When the combo advances, it makes a drop.
If you want to see this working, download LoE from the link in my userbar. The green sword (and only the green sword in that version), is a scripted object. it is not of the 'Swords' item class, but is one of the custom item classes. It creates an FFC that pretends to do sword things, and when it collides with a slash combo, it advances it via a global function. You can compare the effect easily, by trying to slash tall grass with both the green sword, and the bronze sword.
You'll notice that item drops with the green sword do not vanish. (That's intentional, and easy to change.)
A scripted shovel would work in much the same way, but on ground-only combos. I was thinking of adding that to the trowel item, but I honestly think that being able to grind 50%+ combos per screen is broken in and of itself, so I have no done that. (The trowel is instead, used to break cracked floor combos, but it isn't using the same mechanic, as I scripted that prior to writing the functions for the swords, and I never updated the item.)
Edited by ZoriaRPG, 15 May 2015 - 06:19 PM.