I’m not sure if there is a reason for this change or if it occured in error, so I’m calling it out as a bug for now. A placeable object will now default to its front facing “north” (the -z direction in the world). The iconic form of an object always faces to the north now too, whereas previously it would face to the south.
This is annoying to me because I either have to turn the camera around to see things from the front or turn every object around. Maybe it’s just the way I do things, but I tend to have a mental default direction for the camera (which is the same as the original camera direction and oriented in the same way as the embarkment map). I only change the camera direction when I need to see around something. It also affects how I pick the location for my settlement (with the mountain always to the north so I’m not trying to look through it).
I’m guessing it is related to this patch note from develop 2477:
When moving items, their initial facing is preserved.
What’s confusing me is that it doesn’t work the same way all the time. If you place an item into a microworld via lua, you may get a different result to when you place an item via the item dropper in the debugtools mod and you may get a different result to when you craft it and then place it. There may be some other factor in play.
Ok, I made some changes for the next patch that should make things consistent. If no other facing information is specified, the placed item or template will now default to facing the camera.
Examples where existing facing information will be used are when moving an already deployed item or when shift placing multiple items and you’ve changed the orientation with the , or . keys.
Note that a 0 degree facing is still defined in stonehearth as looking down the -z axis.
