With Sovereign Worlds looming around the corner, I figured this would be a great time to bring this up. It would be amazing if we had an API endpoint, similar to the Shop API, that allowed us to query the current Block Colors for a given world.
Currently the only way for us to reliably get all of the colors for the world is to intercept them from the game, which requires a player to essentially hack their game to do it. It has never really been too much issue so far because…
…for Perm worlds, it is not really necessary. They never change.
…for Exo worlds, it kind of makes sense to not have an API URL for them so we can force someone to go to the world first, and again they never change.
But for Sovereign worlds, this is an absolute must. Colors are a huge part of the Boundless economy and it is very important to be able to track the available colors across the Universe at any given point and time. Not only can new Sovereign worlds be brought online at any time, their colors can be changed at almost any time as well. So if a Sovereign only color pops up, it will be hard if not impossible to track where you currently get that color if players keep changing their world colors.
If there are concerns with us getting Block Colors for Exoworlds before they are “discovered” (a player physically traveling to them), the Block Colors API could just not return colors for Exoworlds and we can keep doing it the old fashion way, or the API endpoint could just return nothing until a player discovers the world.