Base Editing
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Overview
This page provides a guide to using the edit functions of a supergroup base.
Base Editing Selector
The Base editing selector is available in the Entrance Room. When you leave the entrance room, the Base Editing selector is removed (allowing you an unobstructed view of the base). Once you have selected a function of the base editing selector, you may move about the base as desired. While in Base Editting Mode, you can walk through placed objects (such as desks, tables), and your viewpoint may pass through walls to give you a better view of the base.
There are several separate functions available on the Base Editing Selector:
- Requires base editing supergroup privileges.
- Used to buy/move/delete items and rooms. Also used to modify lighting, floor and ceiling height and styles.
- Requires base editing supergroup privileges.
- Used to build larger plot sizes or move/rotate the current plot around in relation to the whole base.
While in Base Editing mode, you can still use keybinds, which can be used to bring up the chat window so you can keep a discussion going while editing. (If you use the default keybinds, this can be achieved simply by pressing enter.)
Upgrade Plot
This option is available to anyone with base editing privileges.
This function permits the editor to change the Base Plot, the area within which rooms can be placed.
- See: Base Plots
A floating box displays the current plot information, and an Item Selection Bar at the bottom lists the base plot choices available. Note that one can also re-position the entire plot (if room allows) by purchasing the same plot one already owns, and positioning it differently.
Edit Base
This option is available to anyone with base editing privileges. Selecting this option brings up the three main elements of the base editor:
- the Room Overview window,
- the Attribute Editor,
- and the Item Selection Bar.
The Item Selection bar appears at the bottom of the screen, and provides several editing modes:
- This mode permits you to add and remove rooms from the plot, to move existing rooms, and to alter the ceiling and floor levels of individual rooms.
- This mode permits you to select segments of a room and choose styles for it. These include both selecting the pattern for a given segment of the room, and the colors of that segment.
- This mode permits you to place, move, and remove normal items from the plot.
In addition to these choices, the Item Selection bar also displays a selection of items, dependent upon the current editing mode (rooms, style, items).
Room Overview
The room overview starts at the top with the size of the selected room. The Entry room will say "Entrance Room".
Using the arrows (on either side of the room description) will change currently selected room and move you to the room in question.
At the bottom of the panel are buttons that allow you to Move or Delete the room, or to apply the current room's style to the base at a whole.
- See Also: Room Parts
Stats
Displays
- what categories of item can be placed in this room (All items may be placed in any room.)
- how many items of that category are allowed
- how many have been placed in that room.
Information on the total items in a base may be found on the Upgrade Plot window.
Lighting
Provides a control allowing you to change the ambient lighting color and strength of a whole room. A handy button allows you to copy the lighting for the current room to the entire base. Note that colored lighting can not persist under either "Outdoor Lighting" settings.
This sets how items in the base, and the base walls, are lit at the three elevations. Note that light at one level will spill over into the other levels. Setting colors that look good may be something of an art.
- You can change the light in an area locally by adding lighting items with the Place Items option, if the base is set to "Indoor Lighting" (default)
under "Options"*See Also: Room Parts
Info
The Info tab shows the size of the base's plot. On Homecoming, any item can be placed in any room.
Apply Room Style to Base
This button takes all elements of the current room's style elements and applies them to the entire base. See Pick Style for more information.
Apply Room Lighting to Base
As described above, this button simply takes the current lighting settings, and applies them to each room of the base. See Lighting, above.
Attribute Editor
The Attribute Editor displays different things in different modes:
- When creating rooms, it allows editing of the ceiling and floor heights, and the distribution of those settings.
- When picking styles, it allows editing of the primary and secondary colors of the selected item.
- When placing items, it describes the attributes of the current item.
Room Height Selection
The Attribute Editor displays the Room Height selector any time you have a floor square selected. The selector displays a diagram of the various room heights, showing 2 ceiling elevation choices and 2 floor choices. Also, a 'wall' choice is available.
- See Also: Room Parts
Click on the boxes in the diagram to alter the height. A diagram of all empty boxes indicates low floor height, and high ceiling height. Filling in the two bottom boxes yields medium and high floors. The two top boxes create medium and low ceilings.
One may also choose to fill in the area completely, creating a wall, by selecting the middle field. This allows you customize the shape of the room by filling in a grid square.
Selecting the room height in this fashion changes it only for the one square selected. The buttons Apply to Room and Apply to Base apply these settings to the entire room, and to all squares used in the base, respectively.
Style Editing
When you are in Style Editing mode and have a style element selected (a section of wall, floor, ceiling, or trim), the Attribute Editor provides you options for changing the primary and secondary colors of the element you have selected.
Object Editing
When you are in Item Editing or Style Editing mode and have an item selected, the Attribute Editor will display:
- Object: a thumbnail image of the selected item rotates in this view, along with the Energy and Control the object produces or consumes (if any). Only medical items require power or control. This tab also allows you to sell the object.
- Info: flavor text describing the object. Also vital statistics.
- Aux: if the object allows auxiliary connections, this tab allows you to see
- how many connections are allowed, and how many of those are in use.
- what auxiliary items are attached.
- what auxiliary items are allowed.
- if color tinting is allowed, the colors tab will give you color options.
Creating Rooms
The room selected in the Room Overview will be the Entrance Room. Your view will be zoomed out (to make placing rooms more convenient), but you can change your camera view as normal. You should be able to view the entire base from this overhead view.
The Item Selection Bar shows a list of room categories to choose from, and the types of rooms available in that category.
Placing a room
You place a room by selecting it from the selection bar, and moving your cursor around on the plot. You can rotate the room by right-clicking, and any time your cursor is over a valid location (the placement ghost turns from red to blue) you can place it by left-clicking.
A location is valid if:
- the room does not overlap or touch the sides or corners of other rooms;
- the room does not hang over the side of the plot
Rooms cannot be in directly adjacent squares, they must have a door (1x1 square) separating them.
Doorway Placement
Doors may be placed anywhere in the single space between two rooms. Doors may not span more than one space. Doors may not be added to the corners of rooms. These are "dead zones" for item placement. An item must be at least partially in a door or a room to be placed, and so, no items may be anchored in a space with neither a door nor a room.
Moving a room
You move a room by having that room selected (in the Room Overview) and pressing "Move Room". You may move a room that has items in it. If you rotate the room, the items in it are rotated as well.
You cannot move a room that contains storage items.
Rooms may become impossible to turn or move if they contain a certain number of items (threshold as yet undetermined), or too many items are clipped through the floors and walls.
Creating a Doorway
Doorways are special:
- You cannot set styles for them. They will take on the styles of the rooms on either side (half of each, meeting half-way through the door).
- You can adjust the ceiling and floor heights independently, but cannot fill the "wall" section (to effectively block the door).
- If you put doors between rooms and then fill a section of a room and apply it to the base, all of the doors on the map will seem to disappear. You won't be able to place items over them, just as if they were not there, but if you try to place a door where the space is, it will show you that you can't place a door there, because one is actually there already. To be able to place items over that space, you must clear the fill of the base, remove the doors, and then you can fill the base again. now add the doors back. Note that these will now appear on the map.
- Special trick to allow creative item placement: Doors are considered as being half of one room, and half the other, as indicated by the different styling choices possible when two adjoining rooms are two different styles. The computer allows item placement in doors, but assigns the object to one room or the other, depending on which half of the door the piece is on (determined by where the "grab point" of the item is located). This allows you to place an object outside of the boundaries of a room,in the doorway between two rooms. If you then delete the room on the far side of the placed object, as long as your object is technically in the half of the doorway of the room that is still there, the object should stay.
Picking Styles
- See Also: Room Parts, Base Room Styles
In this mode, the Item Selection Bar give you choices for textures for each portion of a room:
- Floors: Low, Medium, and High
- Ceilings: Low, Medium, and High
- Walls: Medium, High, and Very High.
- Also, Floor Walls, and Ceiling Walls
You are able to select multiple floor and ceiling styles, because you can have multiple floor and ceiling heights within the same room.
The Attribute Editor shows you the primary and secondary color selections for whichever room item you have currently selected. Note that the item color is separate from the room lighting (shown in the lighting tab of the Room Overview), and can enhance effects of the room style.
While you can edit the room height on a tile by tile basis, you can only change styles for the room as a whole. Each room can have an entirely separate set of styles, or the style selections can be used for the base as a whole.
Floor and Ceiling Walls
Floor walls are the vertical surfaces seen between different levels of floor. They can only be seen when more than one level of floor exists within a room. More than that, Floor Trim normally covers floor walls for one level.
To see floor walls, you must either have a 2-level difference in floor level, or have an object placed against the wall (which will suppress the Floor Trim element).
Ceiling Walls function in the same way as floor walls.
Ceiling or floor trim may be eliminated in your style choices.
Placing Items
Placing items in a base is mostly a straightforward process.
To place a new item in the base, select it from the Item Selection Bar at the bottom of the screen. A copy of that item will appear centered on your cursor, with a placement box around it to display the area needed to place it. The placement box is pale blue if the item can be placed at the current location, red otherwise.
The item placement box will appear at the nearest appropriate surface closest to the cursor. Each item is placed on only one type of surface: the Floor, a Wall, Ceiling, or Surface. The type of surface depends solely upon the item. You may change the attachment of the item by clicking <F5>.
Additionally, some items (desks, tables) will permit other (small) items to be placed on top of them. For example, the rustic desk permits the Small LCD to be placed upon it. In other words, there are some items that function as floors, which may affect how an item cued to attach to a floor moves as you port it across a space.
Items initially appear in the placement box in a particular orientation. They may be rotated, 90 degrees at a time, by right-clicking. An item will not rotate if there is not room to put it at that location in that orientation unless you enable clipping by pressing <F3>
Pressing the <ESC> key aborts placing a new item, or lets go of an item you have grabbed and keeps it as it was.
Item selection
- In Pick Item mode, the Item Selection Bar lists items by categories. The categories are currently disorganized, so you may find things in one category that you would have thought would have been in another category, so look through the editor frequently to become familiar with the items.
- In Current Room mode, the Item Selection Bar lists those items that are currently in the room. (A convenience for hard-to-select items.)
- There is no longer a Place Personal Items mode. Instead, what used to be Place Personal Items mode can be accessed by the /command /editbase 2 which will let you enter a view only edit mode of sorts. You can move through the base like an editor, and see the names of placed items, but you cannot actually affect anything. You do not have to have editing permissions to use this, you only need to be a member of a sg.
Moving items
When selected, a blue bounding box will appear around an item. The item can then be dragged to a new location, but the behavior of the dragging and dropping is not smooth--the item will sometimes shift just as it is picked up. This is because you will "grab" the item by its grab point, and the location of this varies. It's usually in the center of the item. The bounding box will appear red when the item overlaps a wall or another item too closely, unless you enable clipping with <F3>. Dropping the item when the bounding box is red will result in the item appearing in the last valid location, or the nearest valid location. If you enable clipping, you can place the item anywhere if the grab point is within the vertical bounds of a room or doorway.
Clicking with the right mouse button (even while still dragging) rotates the item 90 degrees.
Related main and aux items: This only now applies to teleporters, so main items are the portal, and the aux items are the beacon.'When dragging or placing a beacon item, the red bounding box appears until it is proximate to an appropriate portal item. If a portal item is dragged too far from its currently-attached beacon item(s) (or vice versa), the attachment can be broken. Dragging the beacon item back to its portal item will re-attach it. When dragging an beacon item near an appropriate portal item, the portal item shows a yellow bounding box to indicate the proposed attachment between the two. Dropping the beacon item when a portal item is showing a yellow bounding box will attach (or re-attach) the item. If, when dragging an beacon item near an appropriate portal item, the bounding box stays red, it indicates that the portal item already has the maximum allowed attachments. You can check how many attachments a teleporter portal has under the auxiliary tab.
Camera Angle
As when playing the game, holding down the right mouse button while moving the mouse will change the camera angle. Side-to-side movements will also rotate the character. This is especially helpful when placing or dragging items on the ceiling. It's also the reason why floors, ceilings and walls are solid only on one side (so you can see up through the floors when placing ceiling items, or down through the ceiling when placing floor items, or see into a room from outside its walls).
The "home" and "end" keys adjust the camera distance from the character.
The "PgUp" key resets all camera angle and distance (although not consistently).
Camera angle is important in base editing. Your view determines which available surface an item will attach to. Item placement is determined from a triangulation of camera angle, the mouse location, and that attachment orientation. So, if you are looking so that the camera is pointing across the base, if you let an item go, the item will attach at the nexus where that camera intersects with a surface it can attach to in line with the mouse. This can often be across the base, so be mindful of your camera angle, and having the camera looking straight down helps eliminate odd placements. Be sure to check placements from multiple angles to make sure it's correct.
Here's an example of moving "down" the camera angle until the ceiling is clearly visible. Ceiling items are most easily placed using this angle.
Advanced Tricks
Temporary space for moving rooms around
If you have a tightly-packed plot and rooms with lots of items in them, you can upgrade to a larger plot and use the extra space to rearrange rooms, then "upgrade" the plot size again, back to the original (smaller) size. The key piece of information here is that "upgrading" your plot can actually be used to "downgrade" it as well, so you can temporarily upgrade to make more room for base editing.
Also, you can shift your entire set of rooms a few blocks (assuming you have an empty row or column to allow for it) by purchasing the same size plot you already have, but "dropping" it into a different position.
Editing Commands
Video Guide to the basics: Quick Tips: Editing Commands
Keys:
Shift = Hold for vertical movement Ctrl = Hold for horizontal movement Alt = Hold for spin Shift + Alt or Ctrl = hold for 360 spin F1 = Cycle through grid sizes F2 = Cycle through snap angle degrees F3 = Enable or Disable room clipping F5 = Cycle through anchor points (floor, wall, ceiling, surface) Shift + Tab = Cycle through visible items Ctrl + Z = Undo
The Slash commands:
/edit_base [1/0] = Turn base editing on or off. 1 = on, 0 = off /grid_snap [value] = Set item placement grid to [value] degrees. Default grid = 1 /angle_snap [value] = Set rotation value to [value] degrees. Default snap = 5 /room_clip [1/0] -- 0 = In parent room, 1 = no constraints /see_everything [1/0] = See the boundary boxes for everything in the base. 1 = on, 0 = off /stuck - To get back to the base portal /sg_passcode [word] = Set the base passcode to [word]-<game generatednumer> (note: you need to be on a character with base edit permissions to use this command.) /base_default_sky <0-15> - Set the default sky setting to one of 15 preset values:
0 - Praetoria 1 - Atlas Park 2 - Boomtown 3 - Mercy Island 4 - Grandville 5 - Cimerora 6 - Night Ward 7 - Shadow Shard 8 - Storm Palace 9 - Dense Fog 10 - Rikti Invasion 11 - Zombie Apocalypse 12 - Praetorian Invasion 13 - Lighted Paths 14 - Shadowed Paths 15 - Spaaaaaaaaaace!
Labeling with Banners and SG Items
This section describes how to create labels for things throughout your base using the banners, the Tech SG Podium, the SG Holo Display, the SG Dividers or the SG floor plates. Before placing an item that has a SG emblem on it, set the emblem to what you want. Perhaps it's to be a decoration, or part of labeling something. Each time you want the sg emblem to be something different, you will need to set that in the SG window under "settings". Whatever you set it to will stay, no matter if you change the emblem again. All SG items will come out of the editor in the SG colors, which may also be changed prior to placement, but it can be changed after you place it, as well.
Bear in mind that the recent addition to the Alphabet in Page 6 makes lettering much easier than doing so with SG items, but the lettering and symbols from the SG Tech Podium and the Holo Display are still the only letters you can walk through.
You may set any item to "Floor" and manipulate it to the position you want it to be in. The letter or emblem on the SG item is actually a couple of thin layers above the surface of the SG item. You can use this to your advantage if you turn the grid off.
Disable your grid with <F1>. Now, you cannot do this with an outside base wall, but as long as you have a floor underneath and the placement is within the room confines, vertically, you can place a SG item with an emblem slightly behind a flat surface so that the item itself cannot be seen, but if it close enough to the surface, the emblem can be seen.This can work on floors, walls, items, and ceilings. However, such small adjustments are prone to base drift, which is the movement of objects after placement. Reposition items that move, and usually you can get them to stay after trying a few times, unless the drift is especially bad in that base. Drift varies by location within a base as well. It can be better to place items facing one direction over a different direction, it can be present in some locations and not others, and it is typically the worse the farther from the base rooms you build.
If you wish to embed a banner or other object in an outside base wall, please check out this video for the way to do it.
To place the Tech Podium letters and symbols, first select your desired symbol, and then place. Sink the podium so that you cannot see the podium, and ideally, you won't be able to see the glowing lights at the base of the "projection". These letters and symbols will have slightly angled sides, such as a shield would have. The SG holo display will rotate the selected symbol.
Different items have differently sized letters and symbols, so select the one that works the best for that space.
Related Player Guides
These guides are linked here as a suggested reference material, and like all guides, are the responsibility of their posters to be accurate.
Dacy's Base Building Tutorials
External Links