[Suggestion] Construction Plan

[goatt]

Edit: updated mocked UI and UX thanks to @Frogzard, @Nettalie and @Stonetribe

I really like the construction plan from @Nettalie. So I spent a little time piecing up the mock UI to attract more upvotes or supports for her suggestion.

1. add a "Plan" button. The planning may cost 1 log or something else just to construct the model. The log may or may not be returned after the construction is completed.

Spoiler

Prototype is required before one can "plan" for the first time

 

2. Allow structures to be finished like the construction of the Celestial Portal

Spoiler

The "Demolish" button should knock down the structure and return the stored material in it.

To address the problem of lacking science, the players who don't have sufficient science can contribute materials but cannot complete the final step.

The appearance of the structure under construction should change when the material is completed, so that the players (with sufficient science) have the visual cue and urge to complete the final building

compared to the original Celestial Portal Construction UI

3. Model structures should have same size and distance requirements as the real ones.

4. Upon completing the materials, the structure model should be replaced by a real structure without having to worry about structure sizes and distance. The person who completes the structure can be anyone in the server, and everyone can be included in the process, and feel participation of base building and a sense of achievement besides the original planner / builder from the incremental building process.

The original post from @Nettalie

I wish one day this can become true.

 

 

One more suggestion:

I hope we can upgrade (scaled) chests to bigger capacity like how we upgrade the Celestial Portal. The material to upgrade the chest can be marble, moon rocks, more logs, more scale, or scale fragment (imaginary material).

[Frogzard]

I really like this idea. I know this is just to give a rough idea of what it would look like, but I don't know how I feel about it just being a yellow outline because it might make it harder to gauge the aesthetics of a tentative design (especially if you want to see which skins would mesh best with the rest of the design), so what if it were a semi transparent version of the real thing? Also, how would you remove the plan? Would you just hammer it?

[Juny Pear]

6 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

Also, how would you remove the plan? Would you just hammer it?

There could totally just be a button there to cancel it when you're in the build state..

[Frogzard]

2 minutes ago, Nettalie said:

There could totally just be a button there to cancel it when you're in the build state..

I'm not sure I understand, do you mean on the same menu where you click the button to build it? If so, how would that work when there's multiples of the same structure planned?

[Juny Pear]

2 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

I'm not sure I understand, do you mean on the same menu where you click the button to build it? If so, how would that work when there's multiples of the same structure planned?

On this menu that gets opened for each planned structure. Let's you cancel a specific one, doesn't take up too much time.

[Frogzard]

1 minute ago, Nettalie said:

On this menu that gets opened for each planned structure. Let's you cancel a specific one, doesn't take up too much time.

Oh THAT menu. Yeah that makes sense. I thought you were referring to the crafting menu where you have the build and plan button. In that case I agree, this is preferable to hammering.

[Stonetribe]

I have literally considered drawing up a "base camp plan" on a digital graph that represents what structures go where and in what order in the event of playing with friends and sending everyone a copy, but something like this would be so much better.

My only concern with the idea to implement it above is how it would work regarding the need to prototype most structures with a research station. The only thing that I could think of is that when all of the materials to complete a structure are added it would give the player some kind of receipt that you first have to give to the appropriate research station before the planned structure can be built, and then everyone who contributed materials get the usual 15 sanity from prototyping. I don't think that would be very intuitive though.

[Frogzard]

47 minutes ago, Stonetribe said:

My only concern with the idea to implement it above is how it would work regarding the need to prototype most structures with a research station. The only thing that I could think of is that when all of the materials to complete a structure are added it would give the player some kind of receipt that you first have to give to the appropriate research station before the planned structure can be built, and then everyone who contributed materials get the usual 15 sanity from prototyping. I don't think that would be very intuitive though.

How about this: If you haven't prototyped it you just can't finish building it. However, when you prototype it and you're placing it with your cursor, it snaps onto a planned location, and if the plan at that location already has all the materials inputted they just spill out when you place it.

[Stonetribe]

15 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

How about this: If you haven't prototyped it you just can't finish building it. However, when you prototype it and you're placing it with your cursor, it snaps onto a planned location, and if the plan at that location already has all the materials inputted they just spill out when you place it.

Getting the materials back would be nice, but I feel like requiring one person to have already built the structure in question sort of defeats the collaborative base planning/building purpose. You might as well just leave the materials somewhere in camp and let one person do all the structure placement, ya know?

[Frogzard]

2 minutes ago, Stonetribe said:

Getting the materials back would be nice, but I feel like requiring one person to have already built the structure in question sort of defeats the collaborative base planning/building purpose. You might as well just leave the materials somewhere in camp and let one person do all the structure placement, ya know?

How does my proposal encourage delegating the placing of structures to only one person? If someone has already placed one or two of a certain structure and you want to finish placing the rest of them, you can just grab the inputted materials from one of the plans, go prototype it, then snap it onto a planned location, and the result is the same as if the previous person had placed it.

[Stonetribe]

57 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

How does my proposal encourage delegating the placing of structures to only one person? If someone has already placed one or two of a certain structure and you want to finish placing the rest of them, you can just grab the inputted materials from one of the plans, go prototype it, then snap it onto a planned location, and the result is the same as if the previous person had placed it.

It doesn't so much as encourage one person to do all the structure placing as it does render the inputting materials mechanic and ui kind of pointless. All we'd really need then is the placeholder thing showing everyone where something goes, you could just keep the materials along with all your other stuff.

What I meant was that it'd be fine for structures that you build a lot of bunched together like chests and drying racks, but for things like lightning rods and research stations, you'll only need one of them in a given area. And since they often require refined materials, it's better to keep said materials unrefined in case you want to use them for something that needs the raw ingredients. I didn't specify that at all though, my bad.

[Frogzard]

1 hour ago, Stonetribe said:

It doesn't so much as encourage one person to do all the structure placing as it does render the inputting materials mechanic and ui kind of pointless. All we'd really need then is the placeholder thing showing everyone where something goes, you could just keep the materials along with all your other stuff.

I hadn't even considered that, but I think it's a great idea. It's more simple and requires less dev time. Of course, we would require a new way of cancelling planned structures. Maybe you could just right click on them or something.

1 hour ago, Stonetribe said:

What I meant was that it'd be fine for structures that you build a lot of bunched together like chests and drying racks, but for things like lightning rods and research stations, you'll only need one of them in a given area. And since they often require refined materials, it's better to keep said materials unrefined in case you want to use them for something that needs the raw ingredients. I didn't specify that at all though, my bad.

If I brought 10 rocks back to base and used 3 to make a lightning rod, then realized winter was about to start, didn't have enough rocks for a thermal stone, and couldn't find any anywhere near my base, it sounds like I just rationed my materials poorly. Even if we kept the UI and had a lightning rod with the gold already inputted, you would still have to make the choice to refine those 3 rocks and lose them in the process at some point. I don't quite see how keeping the UI or even allowing the player to plan buildings like this in the first place would alleviate that problem - could you connect those dots for me?

[Stonetribe]

39 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

If I brought 10 rocks back to base and used 3 to make a lightning rod, then realized winter was about to start, didn't have enough rocks for a thermal stone, and couldn't find any anywhere near my base, it sounds like I just rationed my materials poorly. Even if we kept the UI and had a lightning rod with the gold already inputted, you would still have to make the choice to refine those 3 rocks and lose them in the process at some point. I don't quite see how keeping the UI or even allowing the player to plan buildings like this in the first place would alleviate that problem - could you connect those dots for me?

You summed it up pretty well as poorly rationed materials. I guess I just figured that having a visible placeholder might give your friends the wrong idea on what to prioritize. But that can easily be solved by just, you know, talking to them lol.

[goatt]

I've updated the mock UI, what do you think @Nettalie, @Frogzard, @Stonetribe

[oregu]

My only gripe with this (because I've considered mods that function like this before a lot) is how different players' plans can conflict, and would have less a point if everyone couldn't see eachother's plans on what should be built and ignore certain ppl's plans. This would be verily useful to people who go under a certain layout, but I could also see this potentially being abused in some subtle ways... people overriding plans by just building over it, people spamming plans like directional signs to help point people to locations, or just making nonsensical plans in random places and/or wasting ppl's materials (so maybe see who the plan is by too?). But that's about it. I wanted this in vanilla, but for some reason it just didn't feel like it'd fit with dst basebuilding, but it's a very easy concept to grasp. This is definitely doable with some magical hex client-mod, by the way (but players would need to be logged in or be able to import a player's information if they were offline) but for these reasons, I've been dubious about it.

[goatt]

1 hour ago, oregu said:

how different players' plans can conflict, and would have less a point if everyone couldn't see eachother's plans on what should be built and ignore certain ppl's plans.

From my experience in pub games, people usually ask before changing other people’s things. Any player who comes to a new base and go thru every single chest silently will appear to be untrustworthy. I would imagine people be polite before changing other people’s model structures. It’s even easier between friends or acquaintances because they communicate.

In the worst scenario, someone override the original plan and built the structure in wrong places, we just have to demolish it or hammer it and relocate it, as I have done in nearly every pub server when it enters late game, which I usually call “clean up”. But relocation is the worst possible thing that can happen in a friendly setting.

1 hour ago, oregu said:

but I could also see this potentially being abused in some subtle ways...

Yes, abuse would be a problem. But abuse shouldn’t be a problem to mechanism designing, because all mechanism has the potential to be abused. Such example included torch, hammer, destruction off-screen, log-off theft, speedrun sabotage. I think the problem of abuse will always exist. But it’s sorta irrelevant to the question to “whether this is a good design”. Or “should I create this mod”. This new thing isn’t some additional incentive for griefers.

[Frogzard]

6 hours ago, oregu said:

My only gripe with this (because I've considered mods that function like this before a lot) is how different players' plans can conflict, and would have less a point if everyone couldn't see eachother's plans on what should be built and ignore certain ppl's plans.

My understanding is that it would be a server side thing. In other words, if you place a plan everyone sees it and interacts with it (since, you know, actual bases are server side.)

 

6 hours ago, oregu said:

This would be verily useful to people who go under a certain layout, but I could also see this potentially being abused in some subtle ways... people overriding plans by just building over it, people spamming plans like directional signs to help point people to locations, or just making nonsensical plans in random places and/or wasting ppl's materials (so maybe see who the plan is by too?).

Just because an addition to the game gives griefers a new avenue to grief doesn't mean we shouldn't include it. For example, every structure in this game gives griefers an avenue to grief (by destroying it without the builders' permission) but the response isn't to remove those structures because its would be too limiting. Better to just ban the griefers and rollback if needed.

 

Also, if people start quarreling over the base designs, that's an argue in favor of this addition to the game. Better to argue over it before it's built and only waste a few logs in shifting plans around than to argue over it after everything's built and waste monumentally more resources hammering things.

[mima_]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1280567941

i used this mod before but its not updated many structure is not in planning tab 

[Wonz]

This would be so good in early game with randoms