Base Stability: Floors Vs. Foundations Vs. Pillars - what's best?

[Zenith]

Title basically. I'm building a fairly large base over water and so far I have everything supported with wooden beams the whole way through. The only stone parts I have is the sloped ceilings and half ramps on their edges.

Are stone beams better than wood beams (more stability?)
If I stack stone frames from the bottom of the lake up to the floors, would that provide more stability than just beams? etc.

Just looking to make sure a 2-3 wall high house over water won't collapse.

[WindWraith]

In my experience, if you don't have cracks, you are golden. Equip any build item and mouse over your structure. In a perfect world, every piece would be green. I build it to yellow without issue. I have gone into red but once in a while something will crumble and fall apart later on. Not always but sometimes. Also there are times when I have a cracked piece and when I login later on its no longer cracked. Game bugs I guess.

One thing that helped me a lot was to make a bunch of pieces out of different materials and assemble them the same way till failure. You see what can do what. There are some good vids on structural integrity but no one has gone the extra mile in one yet that I can find so there's a lot of guesswork still.

[Zenith]

Originally posted by WindWraith:

In my experience, if you don't have cracks, you are golden. Equip any build item and mouse over your structure. In a perfect world, every piece would be green. I build it to yellow without issue. I have gone into red but once in a while something will crumble and fall apart later on. Not always but sometimes. Also there are times when I have a cracked piece and when I login later on its no longer cracked. Game bugs I guess.

One thing that helped me a lot was to make a bunch of pieces out of different materials and assemble them the same way till failure. You see what can do what. There are some good vids on structural integrity but no one has gone the extra mile in one yet that I can find so there's a lot of guesswork still.

Honestly, some of the integrity doesn't make sense to me yet. At one point I had built the entire house full of pillars along the walls, floors, etc. Even diagonal pillars between the support pillars at the bottom to try and get everything working pretty. At one point I just gave up and decided to make the structure longer, not taller, which worked.

(This was AFTER trying to use stone pillars to hopefully increase stability which didn't work.)

[Einstein]

Wood can be damaged easier by animals and weather always affects wood except the poles.

Height is a big deal in this game, to get extra height plan ahead and place next to a high rise in the ground like a cliff side. The parts touching the cliff count as 'ground' for height purposes and this extends laterally for a good distance mattering on materials used.

A stone or cement foundation can handle at least 4 floors, and with judicial placement you can get this to be 6 floors in some areas. At least that was the way it was, I have returned after a 6 month leave of absence.

[Zenith]

Originally posted by Einstein:

Wood can be damaged easier by animals and weather always affects wood except the poles.

Height is a big deal in this game, to get extra height plan ahead and place next to a high rise in the ground like a cliff side. The parts touching the cliff count as 'ground' for height purposes and this extends laterally for a good distance mattering on materials used.

A stone or cement foundation can handle at least 4 floors, and with judicial placement you can get this to be 6 floors in some areas. At least that was the way it was, I have returned after a 6 month leave of absence.

This makes much more sense. I've seen other bases built pretty tall even compared to mine, but didn't consider that the side of the mountains would/could count as the 'ground'. Using that particular method it'd be much easier to build 4-6 walls high considering it's really only '2-3 walls // ground - 2-3 walls // ceiling'.

From your knowledge/experience do foundations provide more support than pillars?