CRAZY IDEA : Blueprint System or Moving Box

I don’t care how it’s done. I just want to not lose all my progress if I step away for a while. Right now I’m paying to not play.

Just throwing this out there… I’d much rather create blueprints of smaller things, such as a pillar or farm pattern, etc. that can speed up the creation of something. Perhaps I can create wall sections for a city wall off project site and then just make it into a blueprint to import at the city, town, mall, or whatever the project site is.

I think putting a limitation on whatever size the blueprint can be will make it easier to use. Personally I think making it limited to the chunk size is a good start. Then again I am not the player that builds stupidly large things to just build something large because the game lets me. I rather use it for smaller scale things.

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I’d say just start with a 1 plot blueprint for now…? 8x8x8

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Had a conversation about this today… would the moving box need to move ALL your blocks at once or could it do it in like 500 or whatever count at a time. Once you empty the first set of blocks it would fill up again with more, etc. Does that work? Or would you prefer the whole build stored?

I would prefer all the blocks get stored or moved at once. I rather say stored because that leaves you with the possibility to start over new and pick out you owned blocks out of the Dropbox do to speak whenever you need it. You can go from a big palace to a tiny house that fits your playstyle better(whenever life kicks in for unforsaeble time). The Dropbox holds all your materials without you having to build a massive storage again.

Blueprints for small things and really big things are IMPERATIVE for different people for different reasons… both is best!

Also blueprints should have different flavors: for example one type to MOVE, another to Clone or sell etc.

How about this idea:

  1. you place a moving block in a 2x2x2 chunk and hit “copy design”
  2. To create the object you place the “learned” moving block in a new 2x2x2 chunk, and then fill the moving block (like a chest) with the list of items required to make the build. As soon as you’ve put in all the items, it deploys.

Not saying BL should copy either of these…posting this so peeps can see how pre-fab builds are being used in other games…

In Trove they are called frameworks. You have to find or buy the recipe, craft/find/buy the supplies, and there is usually an in-game currency cost. They can only be placed in your world…not in the public worlds. If you dismantle it, you only get basic building blocks back.

In Creativerse, you buy the blueprint (you can also make them), and then you place/build it. You have to have/craft all of the needed blocks or you can buy a package that has all the needed blocks.

I don’t feel like logging into them right now to take screenshots, but in NMS and OSRS, you create pre-fab rooms/walls that can be used to build. You have to have the right skill/recipe/materials to build each thing.

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Boundless should have some mechanics to make moving another planet easier.

Right now it is just easier for abandon old plotted area and keep mandatory of items there. If player is active on game there probably enough cubits on saved so that plotting new area isn’t issue.

I think leads issues where other players who might like to expand or set their beacons can’t.

Moving boxes, that would for example only unpack in home beacon could be one option. Able to combine blueprints with moving boxes would be great.

Another way of moving items could be for example rockets that could be used as mailing items that could be used as general quest system for all players.

I think this would be great way to do it if system is able to do blueprinting and packing player placed blocks same time :slight_smile:

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I have a feeling it would require quite a bit of back-end code changes to make such an option possible, without risking the data going bust at some point.
I’d definitely be on-edge about using such a feature.

Imagine there was an option in your beacon to “pack up” and it removes every single block in the beaconed area inside some kind of inventory that expands as needed. It doesn’t remove the plots, though.
That would be great… BUT like James said, beacons in Boundless can virtually be as big as the world. So I doubt it’d be possible for that ‘inventory’ thing to contain an entire world worth of blocks (in a worst case scenario which still has to be taken into consideration).

SO, here’s another idea… I’m going to think it through as I write it, but let’s pretend we had a new tool like the beacon plotter / beacon plot remover.

The beacon blueprint.

Let’s assume that you can use it like the plot remover, as in you need to maintain the action button for it to work, but instead of removing a plot, it copies the plot and all of its content in the blueprint’s data.
This beacon blueprint can only save up to X plots (X being defined by the devs, I wouldn’t know what’s acceptable). 10 plots? 20 plots? < shrugs >

Then we imagine some kind of crazy chest that requires stuff like portal conduits to craft, gems, rift, umbris, blink, exo-mats, and what-have-you, I don’t know.

You can plug the beacon blueprint in it and you’ll have a one-time-use button to simply empty the plots remotely and put all of their contents inside the chest, giving you the blueprint back. Once that’s done, the chest can’t be re-used, meaning it’s transformed into a temporary chest that despawns once emptied.
Crafting the chest would have to be expensive, otherwise people would plot a mountain, use that to collect it all, remove the beacon, and start again the next day. That would be too easy to abuse…

So now, let’s imagine we had some new machine, like an Architect’s table.

You can interact with it and slot the beacon blueprint in it. Behind the table, a ghost-preview of the blueprint will be displayed, just like the blueprint cornerstone works in Creativerse.

Since Boundless’ plots are an even number of blocks (8³ blocks), maybe the player could have the option in the table’s UI to move the preview around, to place it just right.
Creativerse does it by having plots that always are 64³ blocks, and blueprint capture blocks can be either 15³, 31³ or 63³ blocks. But that sounds a bit too weird for Boundless.

Anyway, the table would also have an inventory for you to drop items in it. You could press a button to apply the blocks in the inventory to the preview, even if all blocks aren’t in the inventory yet, it would arbitrarily apply the blocks that are available where they should go, leaving only blocks that aren’t required by the blueprint.

@james does this sounds remotely like a good idea?

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Blueprints will make life better for almost everyone… I just hopr it is implemented to deal with both the largest and the smallest scenarios

Actually yesterday morning I was talking with him during a call about blueprint options. One of the ideas I actually did pitch is mostly what you said - a new plotter or paper object that was used to snapshot a set amount of plots and save the data there. It would then get a number (like 1). Then you would use another to grab another set of plots - it becomes 2. Repeat… Then you go to the area you want and start pasting things in the order you want - 1 2 3… etc.

Most of the conversation I was focusing on was giving people an easy option to move. Unfortunately the more “advanced” ideas take a lot of coding and it is hard to justify the time since it only helps a small group of people. If people are willing to deal with the easier ideas that might cause more work for them or a solution that is iterated on over the course of many releases then I think we could move forward. But, it is still up to people getting the Devs to understand that we are ok with simple and small changes to give us the features instead of a perfect release. A lot of people that complain I think makes them very careful on what they release now.

If we did preview stuff they would have the develop that whole interface and stuff. That is a lot of work. We could have an option for the plot to just be auto-built for us. It would only be used for beacons that are moving in the context we were talking about.

I did ask in the forum here about if we had a chest to store a beacon would it need to be all the blocks in there or could it be a group of blocks at a time. That was another option that was discussed.

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Trove : Free to Play, 2015 - release and has private build space, Dec 2017 - Frameworks (blueprint) update release.

Creativerse : Free to Play, May 2017 - release and has private build space, even has Blueprint at release date.

Boundless : 40$ Pay to Play, Sep 2018 - release and only has public worlds. Nov 2019, still no Blueprints and private space.

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And from what I know, Boundless was originally available in early access (EA) in November 2014.
Creativerse was in EA in August 2014.
Trove was in EA in September 2014.

When you look at it, Boundless is really quite behind, indeed, as we might not have private worlds or blueprints for (I’d wager) a few months. :confused:
We can’t tell because we don’t have a roadmap. Oh boy, that takes me back.

I believe both SkySaga and Landmark has their blueprint feature when they are still alive, even they ended up dead.

So Devs, will we ever have that feature imported into the game, or you still avoid developing core features of a sandbox game ?

(uh, for a moment, I thought we were in the “what turns you off playing Boundless” thread. Woops. :sweat_smile: )
Let’s give the devs some credit, James has showed interest in this very thread. They’re looking into it. :wink:

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They aren’t ignoring the feature. They are evaluating options and finding which they feel is best for the game and how it might be introduced and whether it needs to be an all encompassing solution or whether a variety of options might be better.

It would be so cool if we had a tool that would allow us to copy someone else’s structure, and paste it in your own land/beacon area as long as you have enough space.

… there are many more threads around this topic.

I suggest you study the forum a bit more carefully before creating new topics :thinking: :+1: