Alpha 24.7 Now on Steam Unstable

Holy cow, we have a new builder!

What is this?

This is a complete, top-to-bottom redesign and re-implementation of the entire Stonehearth building experience. We have a totally new building “core” that should allow hearthlings to consistently and correctly build almost any structure you can design–and if they can’t, you should be alerted before they even try.

We also have a completely new user-experience and UI for the builder, with far friendlier and more powerful tools with which for you to design your buildings.

Tell me about new stuff that I probably don’t expect!

1. To get to the new builder, hit the build button and then hit the “NEW” building button.
   
   
2. Buildings are now built around rooms. Use the room tool to draw out floors and walls together. Overlap rooms to make floor plans. Add rooms on top of rooms to create multi-story buildings. Use the roof tool to draw roofs on top of your rooms to finish off the building.
   
   
3. Want to build something that isn’t a room? Our new slab tool is pretty powerful (though we don’t yet do a good job of telling you how to use it.) Once you’ve placed some slab, you can push and pull individual voxels of the placed slab by selecting an individual voxel.
   
   
4. You can also translate voxel slab around by holding down the ‘shift’ key to get the translation widget (again, we’ll work on this to smooth it out a bit.)
5. If a structure turns red, that means it’s placed in an invalid place (it might be intersecting something weirdly, or just floating). Red means it won’t build!
6. When a building is done, scaffolding and ladders evaporate and Hearthlings do a little celebration.
7. If Hearthlings have not made any progress on a building in some time (currently around 30s), the system will try to figure out of any hearthlings can reach the in-progress pieces. If none can, it will highlight those pieces in red. This is your cue to help your hearthlings out by making sure they have a path to that red area. Build them ladders, make sure the terrain is accessible, etc.

You can find an overview of the new builder in the Desktop Tuesday from a few weeks ago:

http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-building-basics/

There are still some rough edges!

• Bugs!
• Template import does not yet exist.
• Stonehearth default building templates are still only available in the old builder.
• The old building editor is still in the build so you can still access the old templates.

Handy Hotkeys

A few pieces of building functionality are available through the following hotkeys:

• Rotate: period/comma
• Sink/raise a template into/out of the ground: shift + period/comma
• Deselect/Cancel current tool: right click
• Select all walls, slab: double click
• Move slab: shift
• Move rooms individually: shift

How can I best give you feedback?

• Create a thread on discourse.stonehearth.net with the tag new_builder and write a descriptive title. If it’s a lot of feedback together, one thread is OK. If it’s a bunch of bugs, make a new thread for each bug so that we can easily show which bugs have been resolved, when they are. Then, especially if your feedback is about an error, write a detailed description of exactly how to reproduce the problem. We want to know exactly how to recreate the error, so we can fix it!
• If you’ve got a save showing the broken/weird behavior, upload it for us to take a look.
• Alternatively, send us a template of the broken building (saves are probably better, though)

Other Things!

• Town Name now starts blank, so that you don’t forget to change the default random name (not that I, personally, have done this a dozen times or anything)
• Overmorrow! (is now a word in a tooltip in the weather UI)
• Fixed some memory leaks
• Fixed default_locale being put in the wrong place for new mod manifests
• Fixed conflicting mods behaviour for local mods/steam workshop mods in mod screen
• Updated insect names
• Updated ogre rig and animations 

Have fun!
✨ Team Stonehearth ✨