Hey everyone, welcome to another Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday! Though I know we’ve talked about the new builder multiple times before, we’ve mostly focused on it’s design, and on our thoughts on pending features. Today I’d like to change gears and give you a more pragmatic look at exactly how it functions, as of March, 2018, now that we’ve settled on our core concepts and have seen them working through multiple internal and friends-and-family playtests.
Building Basics
Recap from the video:
So if you wanted to create a building in the new builder, how should you get started?
As long as the new builder is missing features that exist in the old builder, both systems will live side by side in the UI. Press the left building button, and you still the old UI. Press the new building button, and you can use the new one. For starters, do not attempt to mix these two UIs while creating a building! They are not designed to be used together.
Once you’re in the new builder, the first thing you’ll probably want to do is make a shelter for your hearthlings. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, houses are now built of rooms, so grab the new room tool, which draws floors and walls at the same time, and drag out a square. While the square is selected, you can change the walls, floor, and column materials and colors from a floating palette to the right of the UI.
Adding new rooms to the floorplan is pretty easy: you can use the same room tool to click and drag from either the outside of the structure, or the inside. You can also create rooms by placing interior walls with the interior wall tool.
Any wall section–a wall that is between two columns, can be dragged to resize the room. To do so, shed your current tool with the right mouse button (or select the pointer tool) and then select the wall section and use the placeholder arrows to move it around. Any larger room structure can be likewise dragged around by selecting the floor of a room, and using the arrows that appear thereafter to move it around.
If you want to create an irregularly shaped room, the fastest way to do so is through the splitter tool, which adds columns to walls, thereby creating subsections that can be easily pulled. Use this to create the sorts of stepped out walls that the ascendancy commonly uses in their building templates.
Now that you’ve got a basic floorplan, you’ll want to add fixtures: windows, doors, furniture, and decor. You can do these from the floating panels on the left. However, these menus are populated by what your current set of crafters can build, so if you get here and see no items in the panels, be sure to promote a crafter: carpenter for ascendancy, and potter for Rayya’s children. As these people level up, more items become available to place via the menus.
You can stamp down fixtures as before, and then select them to move them around. If you want to delete a fixture, use this big red X button at the top of the builder. Oh, while we’re here, if you mess up at all, you can use these undo and redo buttons, or the ctrl-z shortcut to go backwards and forwards through your build.
No building is complete without a roof! To create one, select the roof tool and begin drawing a roof over the walls. Roofs, like rooms, are square, so if you want to create an irregular roof, draw multiple squares, and adjust their slopes to look as you want. At last, we can create roofs with peaks that go in different directions–a huge win for people who love realistically styled, non-square buildings. Most roofs aren’t quite right at first, so select them and use the arrow keys to move them around or resize them as necessary.
One important note: this new builder makes it SUPER easy to build really big houses, that take a long time and many resources to complete. Though hearthlings build faster than before and reach farther than they used to, be sure to keep an eye on the building cost menu, so you’re comfortable with the amount of wood or stone involved in the project.
When you’re done with the building, hit the build button to instruct your hearthlings to begin building. You may be asked to place a banner to let your hearthlings know where to stand in order to start building–this happens because sometimes, the deformable landscape makes it hard to tell what areas of the unbuilt building will be accessible to your hearthlings. For example, in the most extreme case, the building is completely inaccessible (because you put it in the bottom of a deep pit) the builder has no way to know where they should start, and you should make sure to then build a ladder to the location you’ve told your hearthlings to start from.
And that’s it for builder basics! Happy to hear your thoughts here in the comments, and we look forward to getting this builder to you very soon now. 
In a future DT, we’ll take look at some more advanced topics, like second stories, the voxel slab tool, and more.
Other Announcements
This week Chris is streaming on Thursday at 6:00pm PST Bring all your builder questions.