freedom of building

[Player One]

hello folks!

id like to talk about where we can build and where we cannot.

from my point of view the locations where we are able to build foundations still have to many restrictions. i realy like a good story and even some endgame goals, but in the end i love these kind of games (builder/survival) because of the endless possibilitys to build new bases in every playthrough. best exsample might be subnautica in this case. limited structures, a well known story after the 20th playthrough, but still...after years and with about 500 in game hours, its a lot of fun for me to create bases at locations i never tried before. its the architect gene i guess :))

well for fountain i would realy like to see us able to build closer, on top of and even inside the ancient ruins we find all over the maps. the starter island for exsample...there is the stone ruin on top of the cliff with one of the three arks nearby. it has a hole in the roof, that is crying for a ladder to be placed, leading to a placeable foundation level ontop. every island has these spots so far, and it would be wonderfull to build bases upon these ruins.

my suggestion is, to allow much more clipping of foundations (and all other building parts) into the landscape and other buildings. freedom of that would be overhelming for builder guys like me. i dont know if there are many other players getting so much fun from base building like me, but if this is the minority of people here and the feature is not generaly wanted, the possibilty to enable/disable clipping by console command could do it for me.

anyway, freedom of building anywhere would be the greatest general feature for me :)

thank you

[chococomilk]

I'd like it if we could build our own "water collectors" like the clay brick sites made by the natives that you can find on the Isle of Hope. it would be nice to build a reservoir like that beside your base

[ian.silver67]

+1 for improving options to build.

To start with, I love the game and think the dev team is doing an absolutely amazing job here so the short book that follows is said with a happy-smiley face and is not meant as a salty rant.

There are many problems currently with building, so much so that building a box on the beach is basically the only viable option.

So, just a few of the things I have been defeated by thus far: Aligning pieces that don't snap with each other (e.g. fences) or aligning them with terrain (nearby boulders, ruined walls etc) is often all but impossible in first person as, for example, you have to place a lean-to so far away from the character to be able to see the pillars and whether these align with whatever you want it to stand next to/near you can't tell if the lean-to is 5cm from the object or 5m. If you want to place a lean-to on the edge of a cliff/rock you either have to stand with the cliff behind you (unable to see if the pillars are anywhere near the cliff edge) or stand facing the cliff so you can see the pillars but doing so means you need to stand so far from the cliff edge to place the piece you can't actually see the cliff edge anymore (assuming you can even move the necessary significant distance back from the cliff).

The lack clipping into terrain for pieces (especially fences, stairs, walls and half walls) is brutally unforgiving, so much so I have abandoned any hope of building anywhere apart from the relatively flat starter beach or the bay beach on the east side of Hope Island, everywhere else seems to either limit building insanely and/or have limited resources nearby (i.e. these seem to be the game's only 2 building sweet spots (viable build sites?)). Building at the ruin with the stone chest in the centre of the jungle would be cool but even with what appears to be a huge flat area, I can only get a couple of lean-tos in there and these must be nowhere near the ruin's walls/debris. (Side point, why make lean-tos 1.5 fences by 1.5 fences? Can we have fences to go around lean-tos?)

A height adjustment button (mouse wheel?) when placing items would help not having to place things 200m away to lift the height of the piece a little and, for example, not have 6 fences next to each other that all have different heights (again, addressing this would require allowing more clipping).

An option to turn on/off snapping is always a good idea, ARK Ascended recently added this and whoever did it deserves a Nobel prize. This would allow us to slightly adjust the height of foundations next to each other to deal with very small changes in terrain height/slopes without need to place ladders and/or end up with foundations unnecessarily (and undesirably) metres above ground level. Half walls snapping under foundations/ceilings would also be great to hide house stilts (but again they need to be able to clip into the map).

A pillar snaps to the underside of a floor but I often have a gap between the ground and the bottom of the pillar, meaning a half pillar needs to go into the gap - have you ever tried to align the half pillar with the bottom of the full pillar, it can take 20 minutes IRL. This specific issue could be easily addressed by snapping pillars, but it primarily serves to highlight how difficult it currently is to build anything but a snapped-together box structure on a flat area using the visual info we get off the screen.

With hammer in hand, if I select a foundation, press E to place it, the next foundation is auto-selected for me ready to go - if I place fence, I have to manually click through menus/tabs to locate, select and then place the next one.

Building in the jungle is generally not viable unless you are happy to have foliage clipping into your builds because the really large trees which provide the jungle's low hanging canopy have branches/leaves that sit below roof height on a single-storey building and these trees are not removable, nor are the many head high saplings dotted around the jungle, as such, flat spots big enough for even a small base that has no indestructible trees nearby and no low hanging canopy overhead are few and far between.

Sorry for the wall of text, more could be said but probably shouldn't be at this point. Yeti, if you see this, I hope the building system is scheduled for some more love. You guys have done an outstanding job thus far.

[Markus]

Being able to build a bit further out into the sea would be awesome. Especially the foundation where the dock snaps on. My ship is always so close to the coast and sometimes getting damage just from docking on.