And in a more directly game related sense, if you’re building with natural blocks then you’re being punished by getting less footfall (or in extreme cases, none) for your effort of building creatively.
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I used soil to top a build I did this week.
-1 prestige to my build per block.
NEGATIVE 1.
For an offworld block no less.
I’ve covered nearly 32 plots in soil and grass. Off world soil, and half of them are already done in type changed grass. The only way it makes sense for this to happen is if a freshly plotted beacon came with the negative prestige of every natural block in it.
Generally I’m ok with the prestige system, I’m just a couple months into this as my first building game. I’m not sure why my work actually generates negative prestige, though.
Balance issues are tricky.
Because clearing a natural block = +1, replacing the +1 air prestige you just cleared with a block worth 0 = net 0 prestige. The blocks aren’t actually worth -1 prestige
Interesting.
Herre’s a fully in-ground beacon, fresh as a daisy:
Matching air beacon:
Ground beacon, fully emptied of natural blocks:
Air beacon, fully filled with natural (silty soil) blocks:
So, due to some configuration of multipliers, partial prestige points, modifiers, or something - at 300k prestige I’m receiving what amounts to a style penalty for adding natural touches to my build.
I’d say that there are things to consider here. Maybe not high priority but still.
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For additional reference i added a single refined rock to each plot:
Now this list tells me that refined rock has a base prestige of 6:
It’s hard to guess what’s exactly happening here without the formula. It’s not as simple as +/- 1 for a natural block.
Maybe random but FYI I was able to add some couple thousand prestige to my main build again with 16 empty plots. Again, based on forum derived info and implications I’m into the “built space” modifier for a penalty on too many blocks in my main build anyways.
That may in fact be why the blocks placed above show different values. That in air plot is nearly 100% ‘built’.
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o0o nice tests! I was wrong, I guess clearing isn’t exactly +1 in this case. Definitely a shame about placed natural not being a +1
- Placed a new beacon. 0 prestige
- placed 3 mach gold. +525 pres
- placed 3 LED. +225 pres, 750 total
- Dug out 21 soil blocks. 0 change.
- Placed 21 soil blocks. -20 pres. 730 total.
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@nightstar @majorvex If you guys are all on the PS4 I can take a look at those test beacons with the debug mode activated and it might help narrowing down what’s happening, just send me a PM and we’ll meet there. 
Edit:
It’s super easy to figure out base prestige on PC: just activate the debug mode (F1 by default) then click on ‘debug information’, scroll down and expand ‘selection’, then same for ‘beacon’ under selection and it shows the base prestige (as well as % for modifiers).
So, just take note of the base prestige number, plop down a block that you want to know the value, and see how much base prestige changes.
The values are for the entire beacon that the block the crosshairs are currently pointing at belongs to.
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PC player. Looks like it’s all good to me 
That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t know if your ~25 blocks triggered the anti-spam penalty for over building (lol) but there’s not a time when placing a block should carry it’s own negative value.
Maybe later, if they add something that carries extreme usability or value added, there could be blocks with a straight prestige penalty, a trade off.
BTW, I got a couple of feats on this newish avatar for both gathering and placing soil during this test.
The game is incentivizing (going green) the addition of the negative prestige at this time.
Very confusing.
Beacons and campfires for example end up with a negative prestige value, even tho they’re technically 0 prestige. In all probability they’re doing some minimal change to the modifier %s that doesn’t end up being displayed due to rounding, but is enough to decrease the final prestige of the build. 
I don’t know why tho I could probably make like 500 beacons and spam 'em into a test room until the offending percentage actually changes, I just never bothered.
Lot of curious info in this thread.
Soil filled air plot with a beacon and a refined rock:
Placed campfire:
There’s plenty of missing info here. The only visible change from adding a single campfire is an increase to my total bonus.
Again these items are ‘advertised’ for use as decorative props. At worst they should be zero impact. In any case, what’s happening is not exactly what people seem to expect.
Lol i wasn’t really that curious until today.
Why do I have 250% of my base prestige with a 100% bonus? Is that the ‘variation’ percentage listed?
I hope that’s not the ‘variety’ bonus I’ve seen mentioned because except for this 6 block tunnel this entire plot is 100% silty soil.
Lol I’m not exactly looking for answers - just noting that yes, the layers added to this system over time have led to some, perhaps unexpected, behaviors.
Sometimes a refactor of an evolved system is very helpful, both at streamlining and reducing processing as well as eliminating unexpected or mystery effects.
As the topic of the thread, my opinion is it’s probably time.
I’m not really doing anything at the moment so if you want to come play with these plots the coordinates are in the images there I’m on raxxa and happy to permission you.
EDIT: just noticed this is a really old thread heh.
Yeah, that’s the variation bonus listed.
Keep in mind that both built ratio and variation are… super weird.
Add say 10 more plots worth of anything (tho I didn’t test with air) and see the variation get slashed for no discernible reason.
(My best guess is that they’re using it as a sort of ‘equalizer’ for people that want small beacons, to compensate somewhat for the lessened block space to fill with prestige, but that’s just a hunch)
I wasn’t tracking at this level of detail but yesterday I did add 16 plots of empty air to my build for a total of a couple thousand (didn’t write it down but I think it was over 2000) prestige.
I’m almost ready to start actually playing for today but I don’t think I’m going to spend my time testing this heh.
I think that I’ll start paying more attention though.It seems some bonus factors work up and some work down. And I’m actually killing myself on these highly thematic builds.
Here I’ve managed to maintain 100% bonus moving points. Note the total is actually 200%ish as opposed to the soil filled plot displaying 100% and giving roughly 150%:
I think this screenshot might lead to some judging, heh.
You should come see that in person it’s my favorite thing I’ve done in game. Got that bonus worked down to 88%.
Here we go now, this build is 90 plus percent nothing but machined copper and warp conduit:
I’m adding gleam but man my chiseler is headed that way some time in the future.
I can also see that I’m headed toward some more optimized building. People seem to place a lot of moral weight on these things, and I think a lot of long time voxel builders feel it cheapens their art.
I’m learning to do this in boundless and while my desire to achieve a visual far overrides my desire for prestige or footfall - I can’t see anything wrong with optimizing your time invested as a factor.
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No judging from me, at any rate. I do try to optimize for footfall as well but never to any extreme. If whatever settlement I’m building at is below 40c/visit, then I bury some iron under the thing until it gets there and that’s good enough for me in effort/reward.
Too much work to carry something to 60c solo, and the next jump up from there seems insane even for someone as obsessive as me. If the place develops to naturally reach that, great, if not, I’m more interested in it being pretty anyway.
I can understand why people that are interested in going for warden/capital/viceroy would get more extreme about it tho. Personally, while I enjoy a good old-fashioned e-peen measuring contest as much as the next guy, those in particular never caught my fancy.
I think what you’re experiencing here are minuscule changes to the Built Ratio bonus. If I got it right, it’s the bonus you get for not filling plots to the brim with blocks, essentially for free space. Which is why you see prestige going up while adding more free plots. It’s also why total prestige goes up by small amounts for removing blocks that don’t grant any prestige by themselves (as in natural blocks).
Because the values in the debug menu are rounded down, you won’t see the change to the % in builds that already consist of a lot of plots/blocks, but it still happens and is reflected in the total prestige.
There is actually not a single block that grants negative base prestige. That includes Ancient Corruption which I keep hearing has negative prestige. Either it used to be the case, or it was always just a myth perpetuated by that odd little bonus wielding results that can be easily misconstrued.
There have never been negative prestige blocks. As you say, its an interaction with the bonuses that produce reductions in prestige on new placements.
It’s one of the things the rebalanced prestige would resolve; so that prestige never goes down when placing blocks which feels like being punished, and instead just may not go up as much as usual (in the case where ‘bonuses become worse’) or even go up more than usual (in the case where ‘bonuses become better again’) so that it always feels like being rewarded instead.
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I was building with those crates before i realized what it quite meant for prestige/footfall.
That screenshot captures the place poorly. It’s not spammy or low effort in any way at all.
But I did get some education from comments when i was basically stacking up hundreds of crates.
Shameless screenshots lol.
Understood. I think I’m making sense of it as I go along ok. There’s clearly a lot going on though.
In the meantime, I build what I like. I appreciate MOST of the comments I get, and I have never, until today, looked this deeply into the final prestige figure shown at the beacon stacks up. There’s something to be said for the fun and mystery of it but of course, the more I know the more I’m tempted to optimize.
That’s not because I actually feel prestige-competitive though. It’s exploring the system and I’m wondering right now if I can push that 100 - 150% initial bonus factor all the way to base prestige with a build that’s not a monstrosity.
It’s footfall that might lead to some actual tuning that I wouldn’t otherwise bother with though.
Everything you just said, I love. 
Speaking of footfall, the reason why I didn’t go play around in your test area earlier was that I was busy conducting an experiment on the new footfall system at the time, the results are here if you’re interested: