Helpful Tips for Building and Visual Modes and How they Work: Part 1
There are two main ways of working with building aboveground Stoneheath. Three if you count the one in the builder! Here’s a quick guide on what it all means. If I feel like it, I’ll talk about how to do stuff with xray mode in another installment.
The UI is confusing to say the least and there’s crazy interactions. Honestly it’s a mess. For example, when you’re in building mode, furniture in other buildings disappear! Hearthlings on top of roofs disappear in slice mode! Can’t place something inside a house on a wall because it’s oriented incorrectly and you’re using v1 mode? AHHH!! Don’t worry, I got you covered with solutions and how all this works.
There are two modes for building visison “v”. I’m just going to call them V1 and V2.
V1 drops roofs and gives you xray vision through the walls closest to the camera. If you rotate your view all the way around a basic box house, the walls in front of the camera will drop and raise back up as you rotate around. You can see the floor underneath the walls too.
V2 drops the roof and walls all the way down so you can see what’s inside your building but it also shows the first row of the walls.
Next we have slice vision. Slice vision is useful for mining, but ALSO useful for seeing what’s inside your houses. It not only lowers the terrain, but also takes the roof off and leaves the walls up. It’s great for placing things on walls that would otherwise be down in V1&2 modes.
The final visual mode is only found when you’re using the builder. It is found to the far left of the screen. Arrows and numbers show the layer of the building you’re working on. If you want to decorate your building ahead of time, use this mode and raise and lower the number.
All sorts of wonky things happen in this mode, furniture in other buildings disappear in V1&2. Colors of other buildings get dark.
What do all these check boxes at the top of my screen mean when I use the block tool?
When you build with the single block tool, you can either keep it always on, or designate it as a wall or roof.
Always on means just that. You will always see that block. It doesn’t disappear.
When you designate something as a wall you can change how you see it in the first “v” mode. Click on CYCLE NORMAL (The UI is bad here. It should really be apparent you can do this. It’s not. ) which then shows a green arrow. The green arrow determines what direction the wall vision shows. Circle around the wall with your camera to see how it will show your walls.
When you designate a block as a roof, views that affect roofs will make it disappear.
Here’s the tricky part: ALL previously placed adjacent blocks(not wall roof tool parts) are designated as a floor or roof. This means there’s an order of operations if you want to make things look right.
If you want blocks to always show as blocks, place those last if they touch any other block.
I want to decorate my second and my first floor but I can’t
What about second stories?! I can’t see to place my furniture in my house once it’s built if the floor is too big! God this game sucks! AUGHGHGHGH!!!
Solution:
- Take a breath.
- Cut the floor out using the hole tool.
- Redraw it with blocks.
- Designate those blocks as a roof.
To view: Use the slice view when you want to decorate the 2nd (47-53m if you build the lowest ground level and you don’t mess with wall heights) and V1 or 2 when you want to decorate the 1st floor because you can see through the 2nd floor’s floor.
The best thing I can tell you is to always check how your building looks in all visual modes and circle around it with a camera before you hit that build button. Oftentimes you can see floating blocks that you forgot to change into roofs or walls that don’t show correctly. Always save before you hit the build button because you might miss something.