Hello, everyone! It’s been pretty quiet on the Discourse recently. So I decided, with my final research paper completed, I’d spend some time starting a new project! As the name goes, we’re making a cathedral! My story behind it is that Lias was once a military fort that was abandoned, and later renovated into a cathedral.
So, I figure I’ll include the details of how I’ve been doing what you see in the project. Keep these tips and tricks in mind in your own constructions, as they can create some pretty neat things!
I wanted to try and make a sizeable project out of stone, but since I already made a castle and town, I figured I’d now try a composite wood-stone cathedral. I’m trying to avoid the mining glitch for this project, since placing floors in the world murders the pathfinder and lua. So that meant I had to collect as much surface stone as possible before beginning construction–multi-stories aren’t friendly to the game yet, either.
I literally spent 10 game days without even looking at the building window. my poor Hearthlings were forced to sleep outside for over a week, doing nothing but collecting resources. Hard times, but this project is bigger than anything I’ve attempted.
There were a few cute moments in the meantime. Yay, Tree Rabbits!
I’m happy to say that with no buildings, the status bar was kept nice and happy in the green. As you can see, I harvested MOST of the boulders in a mile radius from the camp. With no pathfinder issues, the settlers remember the rocks still needing to be collected and don’t waste anything! If you want to build structures out of stone in Alpha 6, it’s best to collect the materials beforehand so it’s counted in the stockpiles (since things will start getting busy, computing-wise).
So…giant building time? Giant building time.
This was the general floor plan for the first floor (though the final version changed slightly). As you can see, this construction has INDIVIDUAL ROOMS!!! However, the way I ultimately did that…
…was by constructing the corner rooms first and erecting their own walls like a regular structure. After that, I snuck floors between these corner rooms. To avoid having grass under the walls, you can start a floor away from the wall in question, then drag a section of floor under the wall while in RPG viewing mode. This will prevent the dashed gray border you get when designing a building from jumping to the top of the wall (which may result in errors later on). This way, all of the floors are also ‘recognized’ on the same height level and won’t interfere with later stories of the structure. The plaster walls were then added by drawing them individually between the corner rooms.
So, here’s the first floor, nearly completed at this moment! There were slight changes to the floor: the settlers enter through the door at the bottom, where the floor’s design is round and henceforth imperfect. At the opposite side, this becomes squared, representing the path to true enlightenment!
As you can see, I have begun placing the ladders to construct the second floor walls. The way to create the second floor is to draw a floor on top of the walls and roof the structure. Once done, erase the flooring on top of ONLY the first floor walls you want the second story on–after this, erect the walls of your choice. I used the outer perimeter of the entire first floor in my design.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Once the walls are erected in the plan, you are no longer tied to that floor you drew out. You can erase large gaps in this floor, or delete it entirely to have a hollow, tall structure. Here’s what the plan of my second story looks like:
Notice that I am also planning to include separate pillars within this main chamber. Simply do the same trick you did to build the second floor, but ONLY on top of this pillar. Since walls can only be built either on grass (or on walls with the trick above), I built the pillar like a normal structure and shaped the first floor around it afterwards.
So far, the status bar seems accepting of this project! I am ONLY building this structure currently in the game, to see if it can be completed.
Well, that’s it for now. I’ll keep you all posted on progress for the Lias project later on. See you later!
I would even go as far as to include this into Stonehearth lore.
