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?