Holy cow, we have a new builder!
What is this?
This is a complete, top-to-bottom redesign and re-implementation of the entire Stonehearth building experience. We have a totally new building “core” that should allow hearthlings to consistently and correctly build almost any structure you can design–and if they can’t, you should be alerted before they even try.
We also have a completely new user-experience and UI for the builder, with far friendlier and more powerful tools with which for you to design your buildings.
Cool, what do I need to know?
This is our “really unstable” preview, which means a lot of rough edges while we keep working – but enough is complete and stable that we think it’s ready to get more feedback from the core community here on discourse. This can be feedback about literally anything: bugs, look-and-feel, speling misstakes–you name it.
IF YOU VALUE YOUR SAVE, MAKE A BACKUP OF IT. Seriously.
So How Do I Get It?
First, you’ll need to make sure you can participate in Steam Betas (described in detail here). Once that’s done, right click on Stonehearth in Steam and select ‘Properties’. Enter the access code bravelittletester in order to get access to the rickety_building branch. Select that beta branch, wait for it to download, and you should be good to go!
Tell me about new stuff that I probably don’t expect!
-
To get to the new builder, hit the build button and then hit the “NEW” building button.
-
Buildings are now built around rooms. Use the room tool to draw out floors and walls together. Overlap rooms to make floor plans. Add rooms on top of rooms to create multi-story buildings. Use the roof tool to draw roofs on top of your rooms to finish off the building.
-
Want to build something that isn’t a room? Our new slab tool is pretty powerful (though we don’t yet do a good job of telling you how to use it.) Once you’ve placed some slab, you can push and pull individual voxels of the placed slab by selecting an individual voxel.
-
You can also translate voxel slab around by holding down the ‘shift’ key to get the translation widget (again, we’ll work on this to smooth it out a bit.)
-
If a structure turns red, that means it’s placed in an invalid place (it might be intersecting something weirdly, or just floating). Red means it won’t build!
-
When a building is done, scaffolding and ladders evaporate; we’ll probably have something a little less abrupt/more fancy in the near future.
-
If Hearthlings have not made any progress on a building in some time (currently around 30s), the system will try to figure out of any hearthlings can reach the in-progress pieces. If none can, it will highlight those pieces in red. This is your cue to help your hearthlings out by making sure they have a path to that red area. Build them ladders, make sure the terrain is accessible, etc.
You can find an overview of the new builder in the Desktop Tuesday from a few weeks ago:
http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-building-basics/
Tell me more about these rough edges!
Here’s some stuff that’s still baking, or that you should be aware of:
- Bugs!
- No roads tool yet
- A friendlier stairs tool is still coming
- Destroying a building does not yet refund resources/items.
- Floors are not sunk into the ground. We will enable this as an option soon (once I finish writing it :P)
- Template import does not yet exist.
- Stonehearth default building templates are still only available in the old builder.
- The old building editor is still in the build so you can still access the old templates.
Handy Hotkeys
A few pieces of building functionality are available through the following hotkeys:
- Rotate: . ,
- Deselect/Shed current tool (allows for resizing etc): right click
- Select all walls, slab: double click
- Move slab: shift
- Move rooms individually: shift
How can I best give you feedback?
- Create a thread with the tag new_builder and write a descriptive title. If it’s a lot of feedback together, one thread is OK. If it’s a bunch of bugs, make a new thread for each bug so that we can easily show which bugs have been resolved, when they are. Then, especially if your feedback is about an error, write a detailed description of exactly how to reproduce the problem. We want to know exactly how to recreate the error, so we can fix it!
- If you’ve got a save showing the broken/weird behavior, upload it for us to take a look.
- Alternatively, send us a template of the broken building (saves are probably better, though)
seems you can’t remove roof blocks with the hole tool yet