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"... don't you have to go down kind of deep with those?"

No, it doesn't have to be deep. It would only have to be below the frost line for your area. What you are seeking is thermal mass, wherever it happens to be.

Many early colonial homes had massive chimneys centrally located. A fire would heat the entire mass, which then slowly re-radiated the heat throughout the season.

Unfortunately, they took up enormous amounts of interior space. It's much better to take advantage of exterior thermal mass when you can. It doesn't have to be in any particular direction, however.

If you have an accessible slope behind your house, you can install a gradient pipe into the hillside when your house is built. Natural convection will move air through the pipe without consuming any energy.

However, moving air is not energy intensive. The thermal mass can be a tube or matrix spread in almost any orientation. A fan will then move the air through it to dissipate or recover heat.

It can also be easily set up to bring in geothermal heat as a precursor to a water-sourced heat pump. Geothermal heat never gets into the low Fahrenheit figures that make some heat pumps switch over to electric resistance heating.

So geothermal sourced heatpumps remain your maximally efficient heat source. "Well" worth the investment.

It would only have to be below the frost line for your area.

We don't have such a thing here, ir it's just an inch or so. Doesn't get cold enough long enough.

Project isn't going well. The computer turned out to be flaky (that was a known possibility), so it's going to be torn down for component parts and another built up in its stead.