terrain tools don't always work

Hey, how come I can't get all my terrain tools to work? Painting works consistently, but I can hardly ever get smoothing to work, and I've never gotten visibility to work. Any ideas?

oh duh.

I figured it out.

the tutorial I watched mentioned that to use the paint tool you have to make sure that you don't have a layer selected, otherwise you'll just paint the texture instead of the actual heightmap. So I'd been just selecting an empty layer whenever I wanna edit the height map. This works fine for the paint tool, but its not enough for the others.

For the other tools, you actually have to go back to the terrain tab and select the terrain again... even though it seems like you've already got it selected.