A Comprehensive Guide to Improve Building

Hello everyone, I have been working on this post for a little while in an attempt to make a comprehensive guide to improve the building mechanics in Conan. I love building in this game, in fact one of my works is actually featured in the game now as a craftable painting. So I know a little of what I’m talking about, but I am sure I will miss some things so please chime in with whatever you feel I have missed. Some of these features are already available from mods, like Multigun’s LBPR, but console and official players do not have access to these. Also, some of my suggestions were taken from or adapted from a shadiversity video which you should definitely check out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVHQiecYLVY). Okay buckle in this is going to be long one. I have broken it down into three levels of priority (high, medium, and low).

High Priority

  1. Pillars should have snap locations to the corners and sides (middle sides) of all foundations and ceiling pieces. These snap points should be able to be toggled from the default center position using a button or key and should provide full 100% stability to each ceiling piece they touch.

  2. The building and crafting menu needs a complete overall. Ideally, I think the menu should either start collapsed with one representation of all the building styles and expand when clicked on, or have a series of folders you can cycle through.

  3. While Building you should only need to select and craft base pieces, which can then be cycled through to get to the piece you want (similar I think to what is done in Atlas, though I have never played it). For example, you craft a roof piece and can then cycle through which roof piece you want (sloped roof - cycle: corner roof, inverted slope roof corner) Or (Sloped wall piece - cycle: left sloped wall, right sloped wall, inverted left slope wall, inverted right sloped wall). Triangle vs square foundations and ceilings should probably remain their own piece due to the different crafting requirements, however I am not opposed to combining these simply for ease of building.

  4. A large arrow should be added to all building pieces showing their orientation, with the arrow pointing away from the exterior side or in the direction of their default orientation. This is a big one, especially for pieces like ceiling tiles in which their orientation can be near impossible to tell until placed (so many wasted resource trying to get wooden boards lined up in the correct orientation).

  5. Triangle pieces should only loose 10 stability when placed instead of 20 (I am not sure why this isn’t already in the game to be honest). Currently using triangles greatly limits your design due to stability concerns, they are very much inferior to square pieces and this should not be the case.

  6. Add a timed pick up feature after placement. I think a good starting time is 10s and a server setting should be added to scale this from 10s - infinity (personally I think 30s to a minute would be the sweet spot). During this window of time a placed building piece may be picked back up into the inventory without penalty and without dismantling the piece, much like furniture and crafting tables can already be picked up. We all make mistakes when placing things and this would vastly cut down on wasted resources and frustration when you or the game messes up while building.

  7. Inverted wedge sloped roofs should snap to other wedge sloped roofs. This would mean you could build a normal circular roof without having to add additional ceiling and wall tiles.

  8. Fix the placement order bugs that are very prevalent in the game. For example, a wall can be placed and then a foundation piece may be placed right next to it. But if the foundation is placed first, a wall cannot be placed alongside the foundation. There are a lot of small examples of these which should be fixed. Also, if fences/crendulations could be placed alongside door, window and wall pieces, as they can with foundations this would be excellent (see LBPR mod)

  9. Fix the bug that prevents placement if you try to place in an area where you are standing and then move from the area (you still cannot place anything there usually until you build somewhere else and go back to that spot). This is more an annoyance but it shouldn’t be in the game.

  10. Allow inverted left and right sloping walls to snap either on the side of other walls or underneath ceiling tiles. This has gotten better, but it is still very difficult to place these pieces correctly when working with triangles. If they just snapped like wall pieces snap under ceiling tiles, the problem would effectively be solved.

Medium Priority

  1. The snapping and placing of large door gates needs to be addressed. They rarely ever snap properly and the cycling tool for snap points, does not recognize most of the available options. Placing large door gates is far more annoying then it should be.

  2. Add medium sized (2x2) doors. This is an often requested feature that would be an excellent addition to the game.

  3. Add a dismantling hammer, and dismantling arrow. It can be a real chore to breakdown a large building especially when pieces are out of reach. It would be great if there was a dismantling hammer and arrow that would break (or pickup if within the timed pick up window) a piece without having to go through the dismantling menu feature every time.

  4. To go along with High Priority point 3, we should be able to cycle through three types of wall varieties: A regular wall with an exterior and interior face, an interior wall with both sides having interior faces, and an exterior wall, with both sides having an exterior face. This would also be nice to include with door and window pieces and could work well with cycling feature already mentioned. This has been requested a lot by the community.

  5. Less building placement restrictions for placeables overall. In general, I feel that a lot of placeable objects are very tedious to place due to building restrictions, a full chess board for example takes forever to setup and in the end some pieces must be placed off center from their squares (this is a DLC example just to illustrate the point but applies for a wide variety of placeables). Overlapping placed objects to a least a minor extent should be possible for basically all placed objects (its already possible for some).

  6. Fix the small arena door alignment in the arena DLC set. The door is misaligned with the door frame in the arena set leading to some unsightly gaps (can we fix this please?).

  7. Snappable metal shelf for chests. Placing chests can be a nightmare for storage. I have seen and built some nice creative storage arrangements with the wooden shelves currently in the game. But could we please have a large one wall wide, three tiered (high HP) metal or wood shelf in which chests (wooden or large metal varieties), could snap into. Such that, two chest would snap side by side on each of the three shelves. This would make storage and organization so much cleaner.

  8. Balance Tier 3 building costs. There have already been a few posts on this, so I am just going to say the cost of hardened brick needs to be balanced so that all tier 3 buildings are about equivalent to build.

Low Priority (but would be really cool additions)

  1. Half walls please
  2. All the vaulting ceiling pieces in the arena set added to the other DLCS
  3. Spiral staircases that will snap to triangle ceilings and fit within a 6 triangle (hexagon) footprint
  4. Glass walls/windows/ceilings
  5. Peaceable trees and shrubbery with or without surrounding planting pots.
  6. Placeable grass patches or paths (like the stone path in the DLC but please far less collision restrictions, these things should be able to be placed basically anywhere).
  7. Dyed/painted building pieces
  8. More robust and accurate crenelations. The current ones are so dinky (they could have areas of no collision to prevent problems with thrall archers hitting them). This comes from Shadiversity.
  9. Proper Machicolations for castles
  10. Steep sloped roof pieces both square and triangle varieties to make those steep castle roofs.
  11. A miniature vault that is approximately one foundation in footprint.

And I think that covers it for now. Kudos if you made it to the bottom and thanks for reading! Let me know what I missed or if you agree/disagree with any of these.

12 Likes

Oh my god you put alot of time in this and I have to say, bravo. I agree with most of what you said (I only play PvP). Some of these are easy to implement into the game and would make a better experience for all of us. My favorite is the 2x2 doors, mini vault, t3 cost balance and the big arrows to indicate Wich direction. Alot of people will make smaller post complaining about something without giving constructive idea to support their complaints. But you did it all. :+1::+1:

1 Like

I agree with all of this, especially number 2 and 8 on the high priority list. Excellent list. A lot of these issues addressed here are things that made it so it took me twice as long as it should have to even master the basics of building.

Like number 8, I did not even know you could place a wall then a foundation next to it, because it can’t be done the other way around. I did it by accident once and thought it was a glitch lol. Incidentally since you can do that, I don’t see why you can’t put ceilings on top of foundations. It would mean we could hide the metal rivet things that appear on top of foundations when placed next to walls.

2 Likes

Alhambra, I agree about placing ceilings on top of foundations. I believe that it is an option in the LBPR mod, but I play console, so sadly I cannot experience it firsthand. You can currently place foundations on top of ceilings so I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to do it the other way around either. It would allow for slightly more robust walls in pvp, but I think the increase in building cost would balance that out.

1 Like

Exactly that, you can put them on ceilings (which, practically speaking has very little purpose for basic builds) so why not the other way around?
I am on console too, so I cannot use that mod anymore than you.

About medium priority number 7, not exactly related but why can we put metal chests on top of cupboards but it doesn’t work with wooden chests?

yesyesyes im only here to play w builds and lore moar of that plz thx

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