Help with Building Cities and Towns

[Honor]

I recently started playing DQB2 and have visited several player worlds only to have seen cities and towns that are unbelievably magnificent. The craftsmanship, the details, the beauty and creativity is breathtaking.

That being said, I've been thinking on how some people might come up with such amazing city planning. I've tried random but that's not working out so well. I need a concrete vision and a plan. But I need a little guidance. So are there any tutorials out there that would help a beginner to create a city? Where do you start? What's the best course of action to lay out the foundation of a city?

[Holy Fool Sehrael]

I've read that some people do sketches on paper (Squares) to roughly plan a layout, other than that, no idea ^^

[onizukaftw]

people spent...years on minecraft, then played this...or maybe this is their first game, but anyways.... those towns take weeks to build.

[lilisaur]

I've drawn rooms on graph/grid paper to help plan buildings. Larger areas like the castle or farm organization I've sketched out on regular paper. If you're planning a whole city then you really need to draw out a rough plan for where streets and buildings should go so it doesn't end up a
haphazard mess of narrow alleyways. Mostly though I don't draw - I have a rough idea in mind and plan it out by laying down the first layer of blocks to make sure I know where interior walls, staircases and doors need to go, then add the floor, walls, celings/roof and interior furniture. I haven't played Minecraft, but did play DQB1 and several of the Simcity games in years past. (Simcity has a similar planning ideal in mind, where you lay out the roads before you put in the buildings.)

It can take alot more than weeks to make these island-wide cities - months is more like it. After nearly a year I'm still working on my island (builder-id nsANdr6AWK), though admittedly I've got the three main areas finished and I'm now just tinkering around on the beach where you first met Malroth and Lulu, making sort of a seaside village with main street and town square and a nicer dock for Brownbeard.

[Honor]

lilisaur, how do you search for a person using their builder id? The only search features i find using the community board is hashtag search words that already exist. I mean i don't see any options to find a specific person on the community board. So when you give your builder Id, i have no idea how to use that. What i'm trying to say is i'd love to take a look at your world, but not sure how.

And thank you for the building tips

[lilisaur]

At Noticeboard, you have to hit the button indicated at bottom of screen to pull up the Menu, then select second option to perform search. The button indicator at bottom of screen is very small. Start button on controller, or space bar for keyboard if you've not remapped keys. Then you can enter their builder-id: the ten-character alphanumeric code each player account is assigned. You can't search by account name at Noticeboard, which is a major flaw in my opinion. Case in point, you know me as lilisaur, not as nsANdr6AWK - but only nsANdr6AWK works here.

On the webpage you can search by either. https://en.dragonquest-builders.com/

At the top of any page you can enter someone's human-readable name (i.e., "lilisaur") and it will pull up any matches. For common names you might get several matches. Even for me you'll get two: one is my primary account and another is for testing purposes. I'm not sure if Steam players can have more than one account or not, but Switch and PS4 players can with separate user accounts on their hardware (one copy of the software and DLC works for all.)

If you know the builder-id, but don't know the DQB2 account name, append the builder-id to https://en.dragonquest-builders.com/detail/?c= and you'll get the match if they have any photos posted (for example, https://en.dragonquest-builders.com/detail/?c=nsANdr6AWK ) This is obviously a unique match.

If all you know is their Steam account name, and not the DQB2 account name or builder-id, then I know of no way to resolve them. Or vice versa. Ditto with things like Sony account names and Switch friend codes. If using same hardware, the noticeboard may provide the account name though - I see other PS4 account names displayed (and they can see mine.) I don't know if Steam version works the same way or not.

[Honor]

Thanks for this explanation, lilisaur. I did finally find the search button.

Another thing is, when I first started playing DQB2, I came across a beautiful island that was tropical and had beach huts in the ocean and didn't know enough to get the name. I've searched for weeks trying to find this island again but to no avail. The snapshot of the island was of beach huts in the ocean. If anyone knows this island, please let me know, thanks.

[lilisaur]

There's thousands and thousands of islands so that's a search in a haystack.

If you liked the island or snapshot and still have it in your album, it should show you the builder-id. If you saved it off to file somewhere, then best idea I can offer is to take that snapshot file and try to do google image search on it. Maybe you get lucky and Google finds a match. Could help if advanced search used to only search domain dragonquest-builders.com. If you no longer have the snapshot then not much can be done. You'll have to find it the hard way, and unless its near the top vote getters for likely tags (like #Waterfront Homes, https://en.dragonquest-builders.com/ranking/tag/tag/?t=78 ) then you're probably out of luck.