So, I know that it is probably pretty hard to change the programming or whatever to include the colors of each item which is why we can’t search for a specific color in BUTT. HOWEVER, how hard would it be to give us the ability to name shop stands? In this way, for instance, I search for Marble on BUTT and it brings up a shop called “Mostly Marble” with one shop stand and 384k stock. If we were able to name a shop stand I could, perhaps, click on Mostly Marble and see that there is a shop stand named “Black” with 14400 marble in it and then know that is where I need to go for the black marble I need…Hope all that makes sense…
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Both of these go back to the same issue. The Shop API does not provide any more data to help players find it.
https://docs.playboundless.com/modding/http-shopping.html
The information we get back from the API for shops are
- Beacon Name
- Guild Tag
- Item Count
- Shop Activity
- Price
- Location
And then we know the world and item by default since we make requests for specific world/item combination.
Any change would need to be the API itself, which I definitely agree, adding color data would be amazing. Based on what I have seen with how the game does the shop locator stuff, it groups shops based on what they are buying/selling if they are within the same beacon. So if you look at “Mostly Marble”, all of your shop stands are groped together because they all sell the “same” thing. I can only assume this is done for performance reasons to cut down on the number of shops that need to be displayed and probably to declutter the results list.
I think the hardest part of either solutions (adding colors or adding shop “descriptions”) would be to allow for grouping/not grouping beacons based on preference, without a major performance hit to how the server tracks shops.
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I keep having these things that I think are good ideas and turn out to just be…well…not…Lol. I think I will just sit back and shoosh and let you smart people do all the thinking.
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It’s still a good idea 
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I want color information in BUTT 
I think your solution, of allowing the naming of shop stands and including that in the API, is a good way of handling this issue. It would help with both the color issue and the forged item issue without running into the performance problems @Angellus mentions.
Labels would let people name a stand “white marble” or “lootsticks” or “T7 night hammers”, and as long as that got added to the API as well, we could relatively easily scan the labels in BUTT for what we want, even with things that are player conventions rather than game conventions.
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I still think it is a great idea. Even if it sounds like I am being a bit defeatist or like I shooting down your idea, I love it when people come up with new ideas, especially if they are ones I have yet to think of.
I am not a Wonderstruck developer so I cannot add things to the game. The way I play games, I must know how things work, I just try to share what I have learned figured out with others to help them understand things as well (in case they care).
Some games (like Minecraft and ARK), it is pretty easy to reverse engineer the game so everything you could ever want to know about the game is already online, but Boundless is not one of those games. So I think sharing “how it works” is vital to everyone’s understanding of how to play.
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I’ve been makind a new forge shop where I only have a few stands with no identical items in the same beacon. It’s kind of what’s suggested, but I name the beacon based on what’s sold, not the shop stand.
Easier for a forge shop though since I “only” need a few dozen beacons at max, an all color shop would need 256 beacons 
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