[new_builder] Feedback - Cumbersome and slow

Community Feedback
1

Hi there, I wanted to provide some feedback on the new builder.

It is my opinion that, whilst the new builder certainly has advantages over the old one, the new features are being overshadowed by it being cumbersome and slow to use. Although I have been waiting eagerly like everyone else for its release, I find that I am put off by it and have not been playing as often as I used to. I would be drifting back to using the old builder instead if not for this bug, but that is another topic entirely.

I’ll use an example:

Untitled
Untitled.jpg1920×1080 629 KB

Here I have my ‘Simple Barn’ design, one of the first buildings I have when starting a brand new game. It’s two 11x11 rooms joined together, with one square off each corner. Entirely wood. Inside is 10 large boxes on one side to hold food, and 4 shelves on the other to hold crafted items. The cut corners and joint gives the roof a nice trim and gives it a little character over a simple rectangle without sacrificing build time.

On the left: The old builder.
You would lay down two 11x11 squares, erase one square from each corner, then connect them. Auto-complete the walls with wood selected, add a roof. You could do it in under 30 seconds.

On the right: The new builder.
First you have to drag out the rooms, then you have to add additional columns to create the cut corners at least four times, including the inside piece, then you have to drag out the roof and attempt to position it correctly, and finally add blocks to get the skirting effect. As useful as the wall-adjustment is, it’s a little tedious to try and drag it all out and takes a minute or so to get it right - even then, the roof looks a little naff because the overhang doesn’t quite work.

You also have the problem that you can’t put holes in the floor anymore, so you cannot have hollow, multi-floor rooms, or draw buildings over mineshafts without some work-around tinkering like adding stairs which lead down into the hole.

Summary (or TLDR):

  • Keep the auto-complete wall and roof tools and allow players to draw only the floor again. They’re invaluable for speedy building creation.
  • The drag feature is a breath of fresh air, though in my opinion its focus needs to be for tweaking a building, not for creating it.
  • Allow us to cut out holes into floors and roads (make a mistake while dragging out a road? You have to restart it allover again.
2

You should be able to make hollow multi-floor rooms. I don’t know how the hole tool interacts with a floor/road that’s in the ground (maybe it doesn’t leave that part of the ground in the blueprint), but there are several ways to do hollow multi-floor rooms:

  1. Drag out a room on top of your lower room and then drag with the hole tool over the whole floor to remove it.
  2. Use the wall tool to draw walls on top of the existing walls.
  3. Select the walls and drag the vertical graphical arrows to adjust the wall heights (good for a silo or something where you don’t want floor separation marks).
1 Like
3

i also cant report not being able to use the hole tool. it cuts everything just fine usually.
also, for your cut-out-wall-corner style, i’d have just cut the corners off and used the paint tool to paint columns in.
the roof, ill grant you is a bit of a tricky bugger.

4

I think the irregularly-shaped room concept is a good one though, and it would be neat to have an automated tool in the new builder that does what the old one did. Basically, allow you to easily select a drawn-out plane of connected voxels and say “transform into room” and it would then add walls and turn it into a room object. The tricky part is how it would function with the rest of the features of the new builder, like being able to drag walls around and such. It’s hard to figure out the rules for arbitrary shapes of rooms, which is probably why they’ve just been sticking to [overlapping] rectangles for now.

5

presumably. that, and the freedom of building the new one offers is so much greater than the old one its not even funny anymore. ill take a little less speed for designing cardboard boxes for vastly more options any day.

1 Like
6

I would be inclined to agree, though unfortunately for me I like my speed and irregularity of designs. Something the new builder is currently poor with. As I mentioned I feel whatever more options it provides is overshadowed by the fact that “pretty boxes” is all about what it can do, similar to how a beautiful interface does little when there’s a complete lack of gameplay behind it.

I’m having trouble with the hole tool. Maybe it’s just my experience so far, but its been jumping around and not cutting holes properly. I’m less inclined to think up new designs since the implementation, and the road tool is certainly frustrating to use in its first pass form.

I remain hopeful these things will be ironed out, though pray it will either won’t take long or the bug I linked to the old builder is fixed in the meantime.

7

For the hole tools jumpingnaround: you realise it matters what facing of a voxel is highlited when you start dragging the holes right?

8

Yes. The highlighter flickers when I attempt to draw with it, and the same with the roads, and sometimes does not immediately function when I click the mouse. I presume this is just down to its current implementation and eagerly await more polish / patches as the tool progresses.

9

Nearly sounds like a rendering issue :confused: strange, have you tried playing with graphics settings?

10

Indeed, tried switching between different settings.
Running an 8GB MSI though so it’s not a crummy laptop to be sniffed at. :frowning:
Latest patch seems to have solved the issue, however. Just got back home to find the hole tool working as initially described in the update videos.

Now I’d just like auto-complete rooftops.

11

I’m kinda curious, what kinda shape of house did you make where one could not just use the roof tool?
Or if its really complicated: the slab tool (set to roof)