As my group finally quits Boundless (we dropped from 4 to 2 within a month – the last pair of us played for ~4 months), I thought I’d post the few things we did that I’ve not seen elsewhere. Maybe these are widely known, but I haven’t seen them.
The first is the edge-case lighting trick. We use this in a couple different ways. The most impressive is the “sandworm” that acts as a center-piece for the main, semi-visible spiral staircase of our base on Beckon:
You can see here that the sand is “glowing” in many different colors. We use the same trick to create unobtrusive lighting on the “waterwall” base entrance:
We also use it to illuminate one of the “curtains” over the exits from the staircase. These are half-block-thick walls of petrolim that can be walked through, but nonetheless completely block light. Here’s a shot of one from the outside of the staircase:
And here’s what it looks like from the inside, if it’s not directly illuminated:
Not only is this convenient (like a door you never have to press E on) I think it’s practical: it fully blocks light, so it should be able to isolate inorganic farms (we never got around to testing this).
Finally, a simple piece of art. This doesn’t use any weird techniques, I just thought it looked cool (in fact, it only requires a stone chisel and something with liquid harvest):
I thought about making one as a ceiling somewhere, by building it over plain glass pane, but again never got around to it. With all four liquids one could of course make an even more intricate pattern, especially taking advantage of how those liquids interact and spread. If you do want to do something similar, I’ll simply mention that graph paper is very much your friend.
And that’s about it! These were all done with relatively limited resources, so I’m sure more advanced players could make much larger, more sophisticated versions. Hope someone enjoys or is inspired.