Most portals are closed or … gone.
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There is a new hub via the Tana VII portal in TNT. The new hub was created in an effort to make the hub more central as the old hub was only on one side of the mall. Also the new hub is lower allowing for shops to be taller.
Hope that helps @scrufola.
Hopefully that also helps you and your confusion @Lunai2 
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I was very concerned for a second. Thank you so much for answering
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It is very snazzy! I like the upgrade.
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The hub is now at a very different location and at a different height. That invalidates the existing mall as you have to walk for some time and climb some stairs. And around the new hub are big, bulky shops. That goes against my idea of a mall. I don’t think the mall is going to survive with this hub.
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I hope i can continue building some time soon…
(Irl stuff is keeping me busy 
)
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Walk through the old mall and see how well it survived. If you are basing shops survivability on it’s size then all the other shops that have been around forever in other parts of the universe shouldn’t have survived either (many of which didn’t).
Truth be told I had 85+ beacons of ashed shops that I was holding onto in case someone wanted a shop and that was originally 10 shops, then 20 …and well up to that nice 85 dead shops…in the old mall many of which I have let go. I still hold about 30 beacons of shops that have disappeared so I can guarantee you it isn’t the size of the shop or height of the mall. The old shops are almost all empty or never restocked and the ones that were have moved to the new area I will say there are a select few which includes my concrete shop.
Now I am not sure what I picture a mall being on an alien world, but the shops that you see in the old mall were limited in height only by the mall being at max height by design, but they all could plot all the way to the planet surface just as they can now in the new area. There were many complaints about the shops and people wanting larger shops. So… we decided to make the shops a little more visible and a little larger by request.
But hey maybe you are right and the mall will die… but I remain hopeful.
Edit: If you want my honest opinion, since there is such a low population currently, there should be one community built mall somewhere that is the central mall for the game. Seems more feasible than the many malls we have that are struggling to say the least.
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Ah, so the old wing is already in decline. I noticed that there are shops disappearing but I still had people fill my request baskets.
Thanks for explaining the reasoning for the update. I agree with your points and the new place is beautiful.
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Fully agree with this. Host and I had the same talk about 2 days ago regarding how low the population is vs how many malls there are, and how lost we always get in them, how much we have to walk in them. A good mall design is a pretty tough challenge to tackle, and I don’t think any I’ve seen so far are very convincing.
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I mean no not really. You would just have to build a portal Hub in the middle and let players make portals to their shops in alphabetical order or better yet in the direction of their plot.
Space is just an illusion when you can Teleport.
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You still need it to be done well and conveyed clearly enough so that new visitors immediately understand how it’s supposed to work.
I’d personally find it clearer to have an alley where I know “ok, this is where I’ll only find gems and gleam, while this is the alley where I’ll only find forged tools and weapons, and over there is the alley where I’ll find all the nice building blocks”.
Might be just me, but there is an overload of portals in cities, I won’t read all the signs of all the portals I cross path with.
So far, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a mall where I thought “ok, that’s a pretty great design!”.
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well make 4 big signs in english german france and spanish explaining it in the subtext. and call them “how it works” deepl is a thing and makes this pretty easy.
No not every shop sells only one thing, you cant enforce that and than we have 150 shops selling gleam and none with tools so one alley is 2000 meters and one alley is 50
Oh yeah, I don’t read signs, but I will definitely read the additional text by having to interact with them. 
I mean look, here’s my process as a mere visitor who doesn’t have time to read all the signs of all the portals in all the malls : it’s simple, I go to the TNT Megahub, I cross survival portals one after the other with the knowledge-tab opened to find who’s selling what I’m looking for, and I go for the cheapest with a quantity that suits my needs. Seems fair and simple, right?
Then? I make a freaking bee-line for it from the world’s TNT Hub, because the knowledge-tab search tool tells me “it’s [that] far away in [this] direction, and here’s the beacon’s name”.
Last I checked, it doesn’t tell me the settlement’s name nor which portal to take to get there.
So my one recommendation? Have a rule so that every shop has more than just “Billy’s Guns” in its beacon name, ESPECIALLY if your mall isn’t the world’s TNT Hub. So, have the Mall’s name, and/or an indication of which portal brings closer to the shop.
I dunno, something like “DK Mall - Alley A - Billy’s Guns”.
Also, maybe make sure your mall is easy to access from the outside. Sounds dumb said like this, but I know a few malls where you either have to come by portal, or by ONE physical entrance, and everything else is sealed off with glass and such. Happened to me to run to a mall in beeline to be like “ok, I’m 50m away from the shopping plinthe I want, BUT there is glass all around the shops and alley on all sides, no outside access, so I gotta go to the entrance which is f@ck-if-I-know-where”.
Or you know… DK Mall where it happened to me a few times to be like “OH GOD DAMN IT, I’M ALL THE WAY DOWN THERE, HOW DO I GET WAY UP THERE?!?”
Also happened more than once to fall through holes and have to quickly pull out my grapple to manage to not fall to my death. Who’s the genius who thought THAT was a fun idea?! People keep putting god damn plain glass for floor everywhere like it’s so clever and creative and I’m freaking the hell out because it triggers my anxiety, makes me wanna strangle oortlings.
Anyway.
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youI would agree, why I feel the Showroom was such a great concept back in the day and hated to see it go.
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Sorry for the glass 
but wanted more road details and not hinder shops to much .
Also center of the new hub has stairs going all the way to ground level.
(As for every portal expansion the hub will expand down. Also why i used glass there )
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Personally, I think plain glass should only be used for vertical surfaces, not floors, unless you’re actually going for the whole “I wanna trick people into thinking there’s no floor”.
But I find it fine if you do borders around it. Like 1 ornated border, 1 stylished border, 1 ornated border, and the rest in plain. That way you have some kind of buffer between what’s not in glass and what’s in glass.
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@Goblinounours I too just get on BUTT, look for the shop selling the items I want for the cheapest price and make my way to it. If it is on a Homeworld I just go to TNT and hit the Homeworld Portal to it unless I know there is a portal directly to it.
Sadly and luckily, I play a lot and know pretty much every portal in TNT. I know I can go to Foxy’s and get marble through a her portal, I know I can go through many other portals doing this same thing. I do however come across some that I have no idea how to get to and that does get annoying and I question if grappling 1000m-2000m is truly worth it when just saving a slight amount over another shop I know how to find.
As far as DK Mall, I didn’t design the original mall, but I do dig the idea of a mall in the sky. I have had my fair share of falling through holes and dying and various other quirks in the mall, but the holes are mostly due to a shop disappearing, I guess I could call that a failure in design. I think placing the mall at max height was pretty ingenious in some ways.
I will be honest though and maybe it’s because I’m a softie or such a history buff it is quite sad for me to see the state of the old areas of DK Mall. I was really hoping to try and save the mall in some ways and in some ways I have, but overall the lack of population just doesn’t support the sheer size of the mall anymore. I would say in it current state the mall may have a total of 30-40 active shops when it supports about 200ish if I recall.
Was the design perfect? Nah? Is it overkill for the population now? Yea… nonetheless… that mall will always have a place in history for me.
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