What are the purpose of foundations?

[jaedenruiner]

Okay,

So there are multiple issues with a game this addicting. I mean, quite honestly, i've never come across a game that so easily makes me want to wake up, log in, and start building acquiring, farming (money or resources) to expand further. It has to a degree taken over my life.

Yet, several times it seems that there is something to be "purchased" that does nothing, or is rendered superfluous by other things. There will obviously come a point when I will no longer need Salvage Data. (I need Freighter Salvage Data more, but not on topic)

But until then, i have to be efficient with my blueprint purchases. To that end, i finally had a new design for a base that I wanted to build and seeing the Large Prefabs, figured i would try my hand at it. In the Anomaly at the construction blue print station, there is the Single Strut Foundation and the Quad Strut Foundation on the the Large Prefab page. There is the small prefab page, buy my salvage data was limited so i stuck to the large prefabs.

Since previous base builds have taught me that NMS has some issues in remembering my terrain edits, i wanted to keep my terrain editing to a minimum and build my house on stilts. Hence the single and quat strut foundation. But they don't exist in the menus after i purchased them.

The Foundation Strut Single or Quad is 40 Fe it in my catalog, but i can't build it. I can build a foundation, but the only thing i can do with that is build a circular room on top of it. Yippie.

So i went back to the Anomaly and go the Cuboid Room and the Cuboid room foundation strut, and then in the build menus i could build a cuboid foundation strut for the cost of 50 Fe, but when i do, it's 2 inches off the group. that's not a "strut" it isn't even stilts.

What's the point? I mean this i like multiple times where the image does not match what it does, and i waste resources to purchase something. I mean, the trading outposts are all build on stilts, and though i don't expect any base we build to look like one of those in game prefabs, when it sells us this idea of a "foundation strut" the least it could be is a few feet off the ground!

What is the purpose of these struts if they aren't "struts"

Thanks
J"SD"a'RR

[japp_02]

TLDR for your title question
Foundations don't have a specific purpose, before the game had a flattening tool with the manipulator they were useful to flatten terrain. But now you don't need to use them, especially if you use prefab buildings.
Still foundations can be useful to flatten terrain around entry doors so you can enter building without putting a ladder, with wood constructions in particular.
Because I'm not involved in large building stuff I don't use them.

[Nettle]

You need to first build a tower, then replace the lower extremities with the 'foundation' piece.

Placing the foundation first serves no useful purpose as the legs that appear beneath your formerly-floating building are stuck below the ground where nobody can see them.

[Nswr42]

i think, it minimises your terrain edit quota, so you could build more

[Johnny in the Clouds]

In most cases the legs of a foundation will extend to touch the terrain surface but the foundation part needs to be attached to another part first.

In some cases too the Specialist NPCs (farmer, scientist, mechanic, overseer, weapons) that appear when the specialist part is clicked could appear below the building floor, if sited on uneven terrain. With a foundation in place the NPCs appear above ground and not affected by edited terrain...Legacy NPCs might still do this.

[jaedenruiner]

I sort of found out through trial and error (as with everything in NMS) that you build up, and then place the foundation on the bottom of the room, and it grows struts. Which is sort of a backasswards method for construction if you ask me

so, i think i've got the handle on it now.
That being said, there are two sets of "strut" foundations, which cost salvage data. There's the 40 Fe versions in large prefabs, which actually don't exist, and the 50 Fe versions on small prefabs, which do exist.

Things like are very frustrating because you don't know if spending research on something is going to be the "oh, this one doesn't work, so you wasted your resources".

[jjh76]

The cube room foundations will snap to the prefabs, and you can scale them up to match the size of large prefabs. If doing this though, there are a couple things to be aware of:

1 - the strut foundations don't always extend to the ground like they're supposed to, and the larger you make them them the more likely this is to happen.

2 - When scaling up both the strut foundations and the cube frame they will clip through the floor of the prefab. With the cube frame you can fix this by putting the frame down first and then setting the prefab on top. With the struts, you will have to put the room first, attach the struts, the delete the room and put a new one on top of the struts. Even then, the top of the strut platform will still clip though the floor a little depending on how large you've made it.