The closer together the plots of your beacon are, the more compact it will be; a square is the “perfect compactness” , and a long, thin, winding line of plots; or a messy beacon with plots and gaps all over are less compact. The compactness measure takes into account neighbouring beacons so that otherwise badly-compacted beacons will achieve a normal compactness rating if the “bad areas” are surrounded by other beacons [eg roads within a settlement, or mall streets].When adding or removing plots, if the compactness of the beacon would become too low due to the change, it will be prevented.
If your beacon manages to become uncompact (due to neighbouring beacons being removed/expiring or just having plots removed nearby your beacon) you will get a message in the Notification channel.
If your beacon is uncompact, then rules about adding or removing plots with respect to compactness are ignored so that you can freely improve the situation more easily.
Moderators are automatically notified when a beacon becomes uncompact so that they may monitor the situation, provide help, or take direct action if the beacon is not made compact again to avoid abuse.Circumventing the system by using an extensive collection of smaller beacons is not allowed and also banned .
An uncompact beacon will be assigned 0 prestige . This means the uncompact beacon will not receive footfall and will provide no prestige to guilds, guild settlements or settlements or the world. Making the beacon compact again will recover the lost prestige. 0 prestige also means your beacon cannot generate any new plot-buffer reservations as you expand the beacon until its prestige is recovered.
To avoid being too punishing, plot-buffer reservations will no longer be lost if prestige drops to 0. “new” plot-buffer reservations will not be created however until prestige is recovered. Any beacon plot that are flagged as “roads” will continue to not get reservations.
Updated the Beacon Control to report the beacon’s current compactness rating. The rating is between -100 and 100. A positive compactness score is allowed. A negative compactness score is not allowed and will result in 0 prestige.
The beacon map visualisation in Builder Mode will now show two new colours for the current beacon you are in, when that beacon is under the compactness threshold with normal plots shown in blue, and road-plots shown in purple.
Beacons in your Places list and Guild Beacon list will show an extra icon when the beacon is under the compactness threshold via a purple grid-icon as we do with showing a beacon low on fuel.
These maps are more than a month old, but you can select your planet & see what is compact (purple) and what is not (yellow). https://maps.playboundless.com/
