The pickaxe seems to have been seriously impaired in function with the last update. when you 'swing' the thing, it does strike and do some damage to the terrain. However, it uses up ALL of the stamina in one swing and that takes a while to recover. You used to be able to swing one right after the other and just continue to pick at the terrain effectively. Now, it's slowed WAY down and is almost worthless and, in the main multiplayer server, there is no other means of altering terrain, so affecting terrain is so tedious as to be worthless at this point.

and, as a corrolary to that, it would be nice to have some additional, advanced mining tools, like the terrain rods one gets in putting up one's own server.