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Holding shift doesn't do what you want? What are you trying to smoothe/average?

Slight caveat: I don't think 3dc is capable of acting past a certain zoom point. If I get too close it still clips (that's okay), but occasionally when I get close enough to see/work on whatever it is I'm doing, it simply refuses to act on the closest thing under the mouse and instead will pick whatever is behind it (not so okay). Not sure how clear it is in the above image, I'm trying to close the gap in the middle with the quad tool but 3dc is insisting on grabbing that yellow edge in the background instead of the one I'm trying to use. If I zoom out a bit (which then makes this very small section extremely hard to work on XD) I can grab what I need but then have the problem of trying to get the quads to go in the middle instead of trying to snap to the other side (still challenging even after reducing the snap force). It's not show stopping, just slows things right down at ridiculously small points

Just occurred to me, when you say "navigation controls" what do you mean, when you're rotating/panning/zooming or when you're doing stuff? As sometimes if you're retopo-ing really close to the X-axis with symmetry on and you're moving a vertex it crosses over the line while you're moving it and that can cause the direction to flip.

Are you near the edges of the viewport when this happens? There's a thin grey line as an inside border of the viewport and sometimes when I mindlessly cross it things occasionally spin crazily

Sorry for taking so long to respond, week got a bit silly! Thank you for replying Near modulator was what I was playing with (once I worked out what it was), could not remember the name of it, thanks XD (I have this bad habit of set and forget with settings once they work which is a problem if I don't export them if I need to XD) Perfect, that did exactly what I needed, thanks! Man those fiddly areas are so much easier now.

So I adjusted the clipping plane thing (I can't remember what the setting is called off the top of my head) down to 0. I now am more likely to go through the sculpt mesh before it clips XD The retopo mesh however seems to have its own setting that I don't know about because it's clipping well before I think it should. I kind of really need to get a lot closer than it's letting me as there's a number of fiddly little bits I need to work on. This is how close I need to be... This is as close as I can get before the retopo mesh vanishes Where is the magic setting for that? Thanks! XD

I find just using one or the other but not both leads to less wtf I think you need to work on the right side with the virtual mirror because the left side is the reflection, with just symmetry you can work on either side (or at least I can XD). Virtual mirror is probably better if you need the thing to stay perfectly symmetrical at all times as you can lose symmetry (sometimes apparently randomly) with just symmetry mode.

There's "Brush" and there's "Move" in the [Edit Geometry] fieldset. Brush only moves vertices within the brush radius (closer centre get moved more, then kind of decreases proportionally going out), Move will move a vertex or edge or face depending on what you select, and will also weld points if you move one close enough to another one and they're within the brush radius (hence the suggestion to make the Brush radius tiny if you need to use Move which I seem to need to do if autosnap is off). Just to be confusing they look the same and the Move tool uses the Brush radius XD You can tell which one you're using because the Move tool highlights the things it's over with yellow whereas Brush doesn't. Move is on the left, Brush is on the right. Glad your problem fixed itself anyway

Use the Brush tool and make it tiny? Brush tool just moves without welding and if you need to move vertex by vertex you can make it small enough to just fit one vertex

4: right click. If you wanted a way to remove a lot of unused layers in one go sorry don't know XD 5. in File > Preferences there is a button that says "Save hotkeys as default", does that not do it? 6: make a really complicated sculpt and run autopo, I've managed to get it to crash a couple of times doing that XD

Is the autosnap box ticked? (don't laugh that has stuffed me previously XD)

Am I allowed to sing praises in here or is it strictly problems only? So I'm a bit slow off the mark but I just discovered that the brush can be used to smooth (it does actually say it in the tiny text at the bottom of the screen but I don't always read that XD) in retopo and now I don't hate retopo! And it makes my meshes look pretty and even like I know what I'm doing! Yay! XD

Thanks @Carlosan! Curves tool didn't do it for me but there was a "remove profile" button on the tool options thing for the spikes/snake which did the job Now I know what it's for XD

While stuffing around I clicked on one of the spline shapes. and now I can't get rid of the damn thing XD Every time I draw a snake or a spike it's all scaley with dorsal spines, which would look pretty awesome if it was what I wanted at the time. How do I get the plain boring spikes and snakes back? Thanks

Are you using a tablet? Sometimes I find changing the viewing angle and/or the pen angle helps when smoothing is being odd. I don't know why though

I encountered the problem again while working on the feet and noticed that when it occurred the toes I was doing had gone out of symmetry. Did symmetry copy twice (because the first time flipped normals) and that made everything work normally again. I'm guessing it was a similar issue with the tail (though not sure why it worked for Carlosan and not for me XD) but I wouldn't have been able to tell with the tail

I'm...not sure how I missed that o_O Still got the same problem (though that remove stretching thing was REALLY REALLY helpful!) but least it seems to be a random wtf with my machine rather than with 3dC. I've managed to work around it (chopped it off and tried again and all good now). Thanks for helping

@justlikesang glad it helped! @philnolan3d I accidentally found its tooltip in the latest version when I was bumbling around learning things the way I learn things I'm only new myself though (as of a point version or so ago).

You could live clay across the entire length of the tail and it added resolution all the way along without skipping the problem section? The tool was fine, it was just that particular section of mesh that wasn't cooperating. I must have done something stupid locally then. I don't know where the remove stretching thing is.

I can and I hope attaching it here was okay :S (made assumption as attachment max size was big enough). Upload took forever (very slow upload speed) so hopefully it didn't break ocean_004.3b

Tried double clicking on the contrast icon? It does something with the lights. One contrast mode looks like: The other one looks like: Stab in the dark, if you're in ortho view does not being in ortho view help at all? Sorry I'm not very good at this either XD

Hopefully it was just a freak occurrence for me that will never happen for anyone ever again

I'll put it down to random wtf then and carry on Thanks!

Nope :< It was off to begin with, I turned it on to find out what the problem was and took the screenshot with it on. Wireframe on or off, those sections won't increase density. I went back a few versions (of the model) to try to find out when the problem occurred and it seems to have happened at some point after I'd initially pulled out the tail o_O For the sake of being able to continue I've just cut it off at the problem area and pulled it out again, am curious as to what would have caused that and how to avoid it in future if it wasn't a random one off wtf

I've done something to the mesh. I don't know what it is. Parts of it (not all of it) refuse to have detail added. They don't seem to be frozen (I tried unfreeze all and at any rate things seem to turn black when frozen). Found out by accident when I was trying to add some detail to this critter's tail. I did the clean clay thing with a huge brush to really reduce the polygons in the tail and then went over it with a small liveclay brush to try to illustrate the problem a bit: I drew the lines straight down but that middle bit (and some other small parts along the top and bottom) won't pick up any detail, working in that area is like using the Draw tool (and quite maddening XD). What did I do and how can I unthingi it? Thanks!