effort of creating ships

[Expanding Man]

This might kind of a stupid question, considering the central point of the game is building ships, but I feel like creating ships in this game takes *A TON* of effort. Don't get me wrong, it's really cool, but I feel like you could easily spend hundreds of hours and 90% of your time building and modifying your ships, and it seems to me you might only want to put that kind of effort into a few of your ships.

So, are there recommendations for ways to get around the time sink of constantly building ships, particularly in the early game? Shipyards seem to sell some procedurally generated ships but, last I checked, the selection was limited enough that I found them a bit hard to use.

[KellyR]

The workshop.

I strongly recommend this set for the early game: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2239064528

It's a modular ship construction set, but it also comes with several full ships, if you just hit the "subscribe to all" button. Everything from "I literally just started the game and haven't even mined anything yet" ships, up through ships that can survive OK in the Trinium area.

Also one of the absolute best bang-for-buck cargo haulers on the workshop that doesn't take anything beyond iron and titanium to make.

[Expanding Man]

That modular ship pack looks like just the kind of thing I was looking for, I'll keep an eye out for stuff like this. Thanks!

[KellyR]

No worries! There's a bunch of other modular sets on the workshop as well. I just like that one as a recommendation because most of them are like, Trinium stage stuff and it can be rough getting that far when you're picky about your ships actually not looking like you slapped together some cubes in minecraft :D

The pre-built ships are all quite useful as well. And early game haulers with any kind of cargo capacity are hard to find on the workshop, so it's just a win all around for me. Plus I like the aesthetic :D

[Puppet #7]

You're not wrong, I'm pushing easy 2.5 - 3k hrs and 80% is probably just in galaxies used for making ship designs.

As stated workshop is full of amazing builds- some users have models every bit as good as any 3d asset really. Hard part can be finding ones that both look and fly well tho- thats where being familiar with the editor helps so you can tweak performance if need be,

[KellyR]

Originally posted by Puppet #7:

You're not wrong, I'm pushing easy 2.5 - 3k hrs and 80% is probably just in galaxies used for making ship designs.

There's a good point in there! It's generally better to do any sort of significant building you want to do in creative mode where you're not losing bits of resources every time you decide you have to undo the last 30 blocks you placed.

Also if you play multiplayer, a singleplayer galaxy you have just for building in is almost mandatory, as multiplayer doesn't pause when you go into build mode, and you'll end up being interrupted by pirate attacks a thousand times before you finish building...

[Mufloni]

The workshop ship designs are what made this game fun for me, flying around with amazing looking star wars ships, cylon basestar, etc from TV series, Couldn't be arsed to make good looking ships myself.

[FuryoftheStars]

Originally posted by KellyR:

Originally posted by Puppet #7:

You're not wrong, I'm pushing easy 2.5 - 3k hrs and 80% is probably just in galaxies used for making ship designs.

There's a good point in there! It's generally better to do any sort of significant building you want to do in creative mode where you're not losing bits of resources every time you decide you have to undo the last 30 blocks you placed.

Also if you play multiplayer, a singleplayer galaxy you have just for building in is almost mandatory, as multiplayer doesn't pause when you go into build mode, and you'll end up being interrupted by pirate attacks a thousand times before you finish building...

Actually, you don't lose anything (last I recall). Removing a block refunds it 100%, resource and credits.

I still use Creative galaxies for ship building, though, as it'll sometimes allow me to plan and design a few tiers ahead of where I currently am (then back it out with framework). Additionally, on larger/longer builds, it allows me to take a break from it and go back to playing without worrying about finding mechanics so it won't slowly decay. (If anyone else knows the pain on that point, I made a suggestion on it: https://forum.avorion.net/index.php?/topic/7238-construction-mode-for-ships-disabled-and-no-hp-degradation-for-incremental-building/)

[Expanding Man]

I think I would enjoy this game way more if the game had a well-developed system for more easily building and buying specific ships. Digging through the workshop for what you need is kind of annoying. The ship builder just gives *SO MUCH* freedom that you can spend days making one ship, and there aren't nearly enough shortcuts around that.

[Summonsays]

I highly suggest just building cube ships to start off with. If you don't want to spend a lot of time detailing your ships, the cubes are literally the most efficient thing you can do block for block.

Personally, yes the ship building can take up 90% of the time, that's why I play. This ship building and customization in this game is one of the best I've encountered. The actual gameplay... well it's ok.

[Princess abby]

in the future i will be releasing something i'v been working on for over 6 months now for the game that will allow anyone to build a ship using ship parts thats all i will say at the moment :) but yes aim for thos who made parts to a ship then you got a huge range to build with or build your own in the future its easy to quickly build parts of ships to slap them on.

But if you are going to do that and its not themed ship to be 100% a certain colour and you want to have a customisation to it giving you the ability to easily change the colour each time you reuse the part of a ship you made such as " wings " you can make the wings bright red.

Then make your second prop bright blue and such break your ship up into bright neon colours so when you want to edit your whole ship thats nothing but parts slapped tougher all you can do is click a colour and edit ALL parts that consist of that 1 colour.

So if you got say 20 wings that are all bright red you don't need to edit 20 wings one at a time you can click on 1 wing and do select blocks of THIS !!! red colour and it selects ALL bright red blocks which would be the wings then BAM you change the colour you could also change there block shape to or what metal they are.

And by doing this you can repeat that on each colour coded block.

I hope that helps ! :D

[Cy]

Originally posted by Expanding Man:

This might kind of a stupid question, considering the central point of the game is building ships, but I feel like creating ships in this game takes *A TON* of effort. Don't get me wrong, it's really cool, but I feel like you could easily spend hundreds of hours and 90% of your time building and modifying your ships, and it seems to me you might only want to put that kind of effort into a few of your ships.

As this game has a replayability value for me so far I build ships which I am reusing all the time as long as they are not outdated so the time investment into each of the ships I designed is worth it

Originally posted by Expanding Man:

So, are there recommendations for ways to get around the time sink of constantly building ships, particularly in the early game? Shipyards seem to sell some procedurally generated ships but, last I checked, the selection was limited enough that I found them a bit hard to use.

I dont neccesarily need many designs as I previously rushed through early game to afford my end game ships which I built 1st. There is a different joy from using your own designs over using workshop designs. Dont pressure yourself to build. Finish a design and enjoy using it. When you get interested or feel the need to build again you might make something new or improve something old. I don't build alernative designs for the same gamestage as my playstyle is not varying. Someday I will have a complete fleet XD

[Dev]

I just got the game on the last steam sale and I already have 30 hrs in it. Most of that was spent building ships. I do agree that learning how to build a ship that is properly functional is a bit difficult at the start but more so off putting. I think this is mostly due to the difference in building from other similar-ish games but also due to not understanding the systems in place. So as you are learning the systems in the game you are also trying to learn the building mechanics and for the first few hours this can be overwhelming.

However, there is very little in gaming that has been more satisfying than building my first "good" ship and taking it into battle. It is just so damned satisfying. I can tell I am still scratching the surface even 30 hours in but that is not a bad thing. I will spend hundreds of hours on this game if not more especially having my friends to play with as well.

So I guess my point is that while using the workshop is a great place to start or an amazing way to live out sci-fi fantasies you shouldn't sleep on learning those building features as well.

[MaceX]

I believe that even if you do download a model that is made with higher level material, you can drop the modules back to a lower material as long as the component exist in the material type.

[Princess abby]

Originally posted by Dev:

I just got the game on the last steam sale and I already have 30 hrs in it. Most of that was spent building ships. I do agree that learning how to build a ship that is properly functional is a bit difficult at the start but more so off putting. I think this is mostly due to the difference in building from other similar-ish games but also due to not understanding the systems in place. So as you are learning the systems in the game you are also trying to learn the building mechanics and for the first few hours this can be overwhelming.

However, there is very little in gaming that has been more satisfying than building my first "good" ship and taking it into battle. It is just so damned satisfying. I can tell I am still scratching the surface even 30 hours in but that is not a bad thing. I will spend hundreds of hours on this game if not more especially having my friends to play with as well.

So I guess my point is that while using the workshop is a great place to start or an amazing way to live out sci-fi fantasies you shouldn't sleep on learning those building features as well.

500+ hours here been spending over 6 months on a huge passion project for this game and it will take me to half a year more to a year to finish it if i keep at it every day tho i'm avoiding crunch so i don't burn myself out.

That said my 500 hours i learned plenty what got me started was go download ships from the workshop big ones.

Ones that make you say how the DUCK !! did they build that in that shape !? then once you download the ship load it into a sand box world once you done that i suggest spending 1 day colour coding the ship shapes each shape will have RED / GREEN / BLUE / TEAL / PINK colours and so on more shapes more colours.

But only keep 1 shape a certain colour and other shapes certain colour so then all the blocks in the ship is say RED and all the second shape is GREEN and so on.

Now once you done this depending on the ship and size you can finally see the ship how its build how they stretched edges and blocks and so on this will allow you to build what you want how you want and learn very quickly then getting tired of trying to work it out yourself with rotating endlessly and growing and shrinking and swapping out shapes.

This is how i learned how to become a semi master at building a ship and this started my passion project as i was not sure ether now i seen some insane things that baffle me to this day and i will follow what i said spawn the ship colour code it to backwards engineer what they done and apply it to my own ship design.

I hope that helps :)

Oh and few more tips if you may not know them i hope this helps.

1. select a block using the [_] icon under the save button in build mode then push F key to snap camera on it to easily be able to look around the block in a full 360 up down and around view it helps when building a big ship and your camera is not locked on the first building block.

2. second thing i highly recommend is again i like to use the term colour coding a lot its very useful with colour coding you can say make parts of your ship red and the other parts you wish to colour a certain colour you can in a big group for example.

If you made a huge platform that is 50 blocks north and 50 blocks south and 50 blocks east and west just 2 by 2 by 2 blocks thats a flat floor then you make say towers as if they were buildings maybe some could be 20 blocks tall and others 40 blocks tall and another 70 blocks tall 3 types of building styles each building style can be GREEN / BLUE / PINK and the floor of the platform can be / RED this will allow you to click the block when you got [__] button active just below the save button in build mode.

you click the GREEN block on a green tower on the platform then you open up your block menu that displays ALL the block types and shapes on the left panel you will see a few buttons one of them allows you to select ALL blocks that you have selected just now that is ONLY the colour you selected.

Now this gives you a huge customisation ability for you or anyone who wishes to customise this platform in any colour they wish to with 2 clicks but you also need to click a colour in the colour pallet panel to when you wish to change the colour i also forgot to say that part >.<.

This ability of customising your blocks by click of a button in a big group in colour coding also allows you to change all them blocks to glowing blocks or really any shape or blocks in the block menu if its ship parts to make a ship to work or just armour blocks or normal blocks.

Well i think that sums it up for now at least its 1 am so i hope it helps any new players who have not picked this up yet it took me little awhile to learn this and no one really tells you this in detail.

Anyways good luck building :)

[Sprocket66]

There is a learning curve to building in this game. That being said, look at the building in Empyrion if you really want a time sink. You can spend weeks on one Capital Vessel in that game.