I’m fairly new to UE4 and have my mind set on a small sandbox indie. I have currently been trying to have the player able to dig up the land raising its height or lowering it, but have no idea where to start. I have 0% experience with blueprint and have not been able to find anything that could further my education with this topic. Any help is appreciated 
That’s not an easy task 
Here you can get more information/thoughts about it:
https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?4224-How-to-do-deformable-Terrain-meshes-textures
https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?33972-Terrain-Deformation
https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?10457-Editable-terrain-in-game
Could the functionality of the editors landscape and paint tools be highjacked and re-purposed for something like this?
I think when you have a good C++ knowledge, it should be somehow possible (but dont ask me how :p)
It is entirely plausible that you could port that aspect of the editor over to the game with the full source. I’d expect it to involve a fair bit of work, but it’s certainly achievable.
Also note this would probably be something where you wouldn’t want to try and do it in a multiplayer aspect, due to the fact of synching all of the data that would need changed could become a huge task. It’s still one of the reasons we rarely see teraforming in games that isn’t a faked minecraft solution where you remove chunks or add chunks back. aka remove and adding static meshes.
The thing is, that is has been done in games already prime example is Life is Fedual, which was made in Torque 3d game engine. I to have been trying to implement this into a game that i am creating. From my understanding is that it uses a procedural voxel terrain that can be manipulated by the player in game using various in game tools (shovel, pickax, etc) and on a multiplayer platform. I have for a few years been trying to find and understand this setup, coding and use in a game with little success myself. it is very limited subject in the community. I hope someone will post some tutorials on how to set this up in a UE4 engine or Unity3d.
Now that we are on UE5.2 has anyone been able to figure this out? I am working on trying to get the same system to work for some time now and haven’t had a lot of success.
Unreals default terrain uses 64bit arrays of uint’s that aren’t exposable to blueprints. (No unsigned integers are exposable)
There is access to the heightmap layer but it too is an array of the same type.
Your best bet would be to use a procedural plugin. To get something smooth it would need to implement marching rays.
I was able to achive this with the Voxel pro plugin
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@Whirep can you say how?
I been looking for the plugin you say, I am not sure how you have don it.
My friend and I are trying to make a small indie game, most as a hobby at the moment, let us see if it can lead to more along the road.
The game is heavy inspired of a old MMO Wurm Online, but we cant find a way to make terraforming work in the game, so it is similar to this game, or life is feudal for that matter.