In one of the Youtuber videos, someone mentioned that the ground effects - water surface, fire surface, ice surface would stay on the ground forever once placed. Leaving aside the issues that could cause for traveling NPC's, it's not that realistic. In our world, eventually, the lava will cool, the ice will melt to water, the water will evaporate.
I think that the surfaces should also return to normal about 24 hours after they were created. Maybe there could be four stages. By default: Hours 0-6 - full strength, hours 7-12, 75% strength, 13-18 50% strength, 19-24 25% strength.
Different environments could have different rates of degradation as well. Cyseal looks to be warm and sunny, so ice will melt faster, water will evaporate faster, but fire won't be affected and stay the full duration. That snow level I saw a screenshot of once will have fire degrade quickly, water freeze, and ice will stay longer. The Dark forest is damp, cool and gets little sun, so fire degrades a bit faster, ice remains a bit longer, water evaporates much more slowly.
