Construction System
An essential part of Planetrism game is to build you own colony. Regardless of the number of inhabitants, you will need an infrastructure of buildings, equipment and facilities to serve all the tasks you have to do in order to survive and prosper on an exoplanet. As described in previous posts, the game core involves five general areas of tasks and activities:
- Energy cycle,
- Food cycle,
- Materials cycle,
- Science cycle and
- Community cycle
You need greenhouses to grow food, and you need barracks to live in. For scientific studies you need laboratories. And if you want to keep things in control, you need to have a command centre. Power, air and data has to be transferred from their sources, storaged and then distributed through appropriate conduits where it is needed. More detailed account about game core may be found in previous post.
Construction system is still in early stages, but you can already construct buildings anywhere you like. There is no construction grid on the landscape. Instead of that, you can place your buildings anywhere you like. You pick the spot and orientation. System calculates how much resources and work is needed based on building itself, location and terrain form beneath it.
This video shows basic colony building in quite normal environment. Usually colonies are quite small and built in places where environment offers best protections against storms, and near suitable source of energy and resources. But in normal game, there is no artificial limit how much you can build. Only limit is how much resources and workforce you have at your disposal. In practice, if you use enough time, planning and patience you could build massive colony just like in this video.
In these videos, the whole construction process is intentionally sped up. In real game it may take hours or days to build any structure depending on how much workforce you have available, how much resources you have available and where they are etc. Any building is constructed in several stages represented visually.
Player uses a data tablet to manage construction project. He may browse available building templates, choose a location, and then start the building project. He also gets information about factors like construction time estimates, available resources etc. You can manage whole process on the ground or from drone cam perspective.
In addition to plains, hills and mountains, you may build on water, too. Either as a floating colony or with a base reaching the bottom ground.
All colony layouts you see in videos have been built with this system in game itself. This system is still under heavy development. Please keep in mind, that in the videos above we have used several placeholder materials and temporary structures.
(Published originally 10 Jul, 2017)
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