Saveable room layouts/blueprints and construction prioritization

[Terraset]

Basically instead of having to place each item individually over and over for all of your 6x6 bedrooms with red carpets, metal walls, a bed, a lamp, and two potted plants you just put all of that into one custom layout/blueprint thing and place it all at once. Then when you need a new room you just place the layout instead of having to tape measure everything all over again. It could make large base building or base additions very efficient.

Prioritization tags/flags could be set on different projects so that you don't have a colonist buildings carpets when they don't even have the bed in let alone the walls and doors built as I have often had happen. Such prioritization would lead to less micromanaging and leave the player free to deal with more important things.

Prioritization would probably do best in a mixed per specific construction (One specific stone wall tile) and per construction type (All wall constructions) basis.

It may also pay in that sense to have a third option on the main menu. Colony creation, world creation, and then blueprint/layout creation. An entire base could be planned out in the tool complete with zoning and displays of exactly how many resources it would take to build. Then when entering the game plop your layout down and forget about it.

::EDIT::

If the layout is placed in an invalid area, I.e partially inside of a mountain, it shouldn't simply fail to place. Instead construction and orders in general should use a goal system to determine what actions colonists need to take. Example, you place a room layout with metal walls down in a way that one wall tile is in a mountain. In order for that wall to be built that rock tile needs to be mined away. Therefore the system creates a temporary mining order in place of the wall construction order. Once that area is mined away the wall construction order is placed and built. It may be useful to have a notification and/or a prompt for the player in case they didn't realize they placed their layout in that way and didn't want to mine that rock.

This would also avoid issues such as wanting only a single wall between two rooms but having a complete room layout blueprint with four walls. You would either need to always have two walls thus wasting resources, or the existing walls would be torn down and rebuilt for no reason, or you'd have to design multiple room layouts to compensate for the existing walls. The goal system would recognize that there are completed wall tiles in the area that you are trying to designate wall tile construction. Thus it would consider the goal complete and change nothing. This would save time, resources and frustration from needless micromanaging.

[Visitor000]

+1 this is good idea ¤⊙ω°℃℉»«¡¢£¥â,¬Â®Â©

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[BetaSpectre]

Love the idea, Full Support if it can be done.

[keylocke]

it's been suggested quite a long time ago, along with requests to add building/mining rulers (drag the mouse and it will display the area's dimension. ie : 9x1, 12x24, etc..)

+1 on this, but sadly, i kinda doubt this will get implemented. 

[Terraset]

First, extra idea. An auto-rebuild orde in case something gets destroyed like a door. In other words the construction plot would be a permanent part of whatever tiles it was laid on and if something gets destroyed the goal is considered incomplete and a construction plan is relayed for it. Options for turning this on and off at players discretion would be great.

Second, even if Ty doesn't implement it it wouldn't be all that difficult to mod in. From what I can tell tile properties are already something recorded by the game and it already has a sort of hierarchical orders system. All that would really need to be done from my perspective is to combine these things together like a macro. Simulating each individual menu selection and placement ingame but as one command. Localized around whatever tile you are currently hovering over. With that localization you could even do things like rotate the layout like you rotate every other object.

I mean they did build order mods like this for games like Supreme Commander so I don't see why you couldn't do it for a game that appears to be designed for it by default. Being tile based and all. I would program it myself if I knew specifically how but programming is not a priority I can afford in my life right now. Which is a shame because I want to mod this game into a crazy Space Station 13-esque hybrid total conversionish thing at some point when I have the time unless someone beats me to it.