Tips for Building Towns and Other Multi-Structure Complexes

[DaEndGame]

Tips for Building Towns and Other Multi-Structure Complexes

One of my favourite things to do in survival sandbox games like Ark and Minecraft is to build towns and other multi-structured complexes, eg forts, so I thought I would share my personal tips on how to do so. Before I begin I will say that if you have your own tips or ideas on the subject, feel free to share them. Also know that these aren’t in any specific order, except for the first few.
With out further ado, I present to you Degolas’ Tips for Town Building:

-    Location, Location, Location: when building (an) aesthetically pleasing structure/s it is best to build it in a location that suits it, after all who builds an adobe desert hut in the tundra?      “I do!”   “Shut up Jimmy, It was rhetorical!” 

-    Terrible Terrain Troubles: This coincides with Location, Location, Location; when picking your location you need to scope the terrain a little and decide what kind of terrain you prefer – Flat, roughly even elevation i.e. the top if the Foot Paw (?) and the plains to the volcanoes east. Or are you for the multileveled hilly area’s with small bits of flat area. i.e. the circled area in the image below (if it is there). Personally I’m for the latter because it gives character to the product, even before it is finished.            Use the Terrain to your advantage.

-    Layout plans: This has multiple points in itself, one of which is below, so I’ll cover the most basic part of this here. After you have sorted out the above two tips and found what is hopefully the location of your dreams, it is time to plan the layout of the town. If you just build the structures where ever you please, all willy nilly like, you are likely to end up with a checker board that isn’t parallel. The best way to go about I find is to figure out where you want the paths and roads to be and mark them out or take a picture of the area from above and use a paint tool on the image to mark everything out with railings or fence foundations; it is really up to you. I’ll try and get a picture to show myself.

-    Strictly Districts: Another part of the layout is sectioning the districts, such as the market district, industrial district, etc. This is important because you don’t build a house in the middle of the marketplace. I find the best way to organise districts is put them where they seem most logical, i.e. the markets should be somewhere central and easy to access, like along the main road or near by the docks (if you have one); the docks would obviously go on the waters edge and the housing district would go in a sheltered area.

-    As an extra note on layouts, most people have their own personal preference when it comes to them, so you don’t necessarily have to do it my way. After all these are my tips and partly personal preferences, not yours.

-    Building styles: Obviously most people have a preferred style of building, but sometimes the area just doesn’t suit yours and sometimes we have to change it to suit the environ. My personal belief when it comes to style are that there are two areas that styles are are characterised by, those are the tier of the style (rustic, modern, futuristic, etc) and building method, which is basically what kind of details you, (curves, pillar details, the small extra’s like an M&P on the table, structure shape, etc).

This is all of my tips for now, If I think of others I will add them. Like I said earlier, if you have any tips yourself feel free to share them.

Thank you for reading
-    Degolas aka DaEndGame

 

PS; to the Moderator it may concern,

I'm not sure if this belongs in general discussion or not, so if it doesn't could you please move it to the respective place. Thank you.

[ILuvTheAwesomeDevs]

+1 I'll bookmark this page for when I finish grinding my metal foundation! Thanks for the tips!

[Critter]

Any screenshots, my man, on your current progress/current project?

[DaEndGame]

@Critter I'll try, it isn't easy 'cause I'm on xbox, but I'll try.

Edit: Here it is,

I'll say right now that the layout I have planned is commited to memory. So I'll also say the the front beach there is going to be small store houses and there will be a marketplace to the right and then there will be warehouses down the beach to the left. The housing district will be going down to the right there, behind the markets. I have yet to decide where the tavern and Inn will be (preferably next to each other) and the prison and garrison housing will be going on the raised area that is next to the river, a few hundred metres up that hill.      

 

2nd Edit: I forgot to mention that that harbour will stretch all around the most of that beach and the most important thing, which I forgot, is that this is the humble beginnings of Vrarq Harbour

[Critter]

Awe man we gotta get you a computer, my man lol 

buildings so much easier lol 

Ima follow this thread, keep us updated on your work ^ I'm curious to see your progress ^^

[DaEndGame]

3 hours ago, Critter said:

Awe man we gotta get you a computer, my man lol 

buildings so much easier lol 

Ima follow this thread, keep us updated on your work ^ I'm curious to see your progress ^^

Will do. 

As for a PC; I'm working on that, but it'll be a long, long time till that happens. But when I do I'm ganna get some buildin mods.

[DaEndGame]

I forgot that the server this is on was changing from Ths Island P+ to Center Core game. But do not worry, I will begin anew on a town and keep y'all updated.

[Cymas]

I would caution heavily on the use of most building mods, tbh. If you build using them if the mod breaks in any way you could find yourself with demolished structures where your base used to be. This happened to a couple unfortunate souls on my server when our server host removed our building mod with no advance notice, instantly removing all of the structures built using that mod. Fortunately I had warned my tribemates not to use mod pieces for anything important so we lost a half dozen walls placed for aesthetics, nothing more.

As for the roads, I used painted pillars to mark the edges of the roads and general pathing when getting the initial layout down. My tribemates said it helped them a lot since they knew where not to build when placing a new building foundation. Since we all main spinos I made sure all main roads are 2 spinos wide to make sure we can travel comfortably around our city.

Somewhat contradictory to one of your statements, I find changing up building styles is both more realistic and adds a ton of visual interest to your town/city build. We have an armory that resembles a castle, turn the corner and go down the street and there's a Old West saloon-inspired saddlery. Make another turn into the market district and there's an English pub.

Adding on to that somewhat, paint. Paints adds a level of depth and character bare wood and stone does not have, especially on large builds. And metal kind of needs paint or you will hear no end of it from people who forgot to turn off bloomquality and lightshafts in game options or command console, ask me how I know lol.

[DaEndGame]

@Cymas Well first things first, sorry I took so long to reply and thank you for your input. For an unknown reason I was not follwing my own thread and therefore hadn't known that anyone had posted after me.

I'll continue on in summarised dot points:

• Incase you misread I'm am on xbox, so there can only get the mods the devs give us...
• When it comes to me and building I try to keep the style loosely the same, and the way I meant was don't put illogical things in a place. 
• If I do do different styles I try to keep the similar and slowly transition the buildings between the styles.
• I always leave my painting till the last minute and only ever use it unless the build needs it.
• I hate using metal structures (minus the door) with a passion. The door is the only one I use because I like it better then the wooden door and fits into the wood doorframe better then reinforced wood door of the stone tier.
• For roads I am generally in P+ where I can use those wodden and stone fences, but since the server is in core game now, I am going to use a variety of ways.

 

That part aside, here is what I have on so far:           (Warning there are a few and they are blurry)

 

Upload issues, I'm trying to resolve them.

[DaEndGame]

This is only a small project till the end of the halloween event. After that I am moving to another patch of land that is mine for me to build on, organised by the server mods and owner. I was given directions to the area but could find it, but when I do find I'll take a pic for you guys (and gals) to see. Sorry for the picture quality, they are screen shots from a video I was trying to upload for you all to see.

For now, I present to y'all the humble beginnings of Lightwood Hamlet and Lightwood House:

A side of the house.

 

 Another project, which was aborted due the problems of an unamed entity *glares at the desert*

I present Jaywall's Rock in honour of @Jaywall:

[Cymas]

Not everyone plays on XBOX or only uses P+.  You asked if other people had tips to share, those were what I had at the time of my post. If you only wanted tips for your specific playstyle, I'm afraid I don't have any as I play on PC "standard" Ark, no P+. I've been building a city with my tribe for the last 5 months or so and those were just the things I picked up along the way.

In regards to the pillars, I do remove them once that part of the city has been developed. It basically shows the "no build zone" for my tribemates since the roads are carefully spaced to accommodate our personal preferences.

This is an older image, but it is a screenshot of our "industrial" district:

The buildings visible are the Workshop (crafting stations), Industrial Forge Platform w/ landing pad, Hunting Lodge, Taming Pens, Saddlery, Clinic, and the unfinished building in the back is the Armory, which is long since completed. You can see one painted pillar in the background denoting one of the roads to town square. Most of these are unpainted, but you can kinda tell the clinic is white painted stone, and the taming pens have painted gates. We're still under construction, but eventually I plan to do a "finishing" pass to pretty things up more.

[DaEndGame]

You seemed to be speaking as if i were on xbox, sorry for the confusion.

[Cymas]

Just general tips that can probably be applied to either system. I honestly have no idea what the limitations on XBOX are besides no mods. I play with very limited mods myself simply because mods do have that tendency to break and I'd rather not lose all my work. So everything I build is vanilla/base Ark, with occasional mod pieces for embellishment.

[DaEndGame]

So far as I have been able to tell, the only limitations are how high your ping gets and how laggy an area gets when there is too much stuff.

[DaEndGame]

Another tip for all, this one involves building bridges. Bridges aren't a necessity in a town, but sometimes one might wish to build one to make getting from point A to point B.     First you will obviously want to find the points you wish to connect and build a foundation on one end, that is facing the other end. From that foundation, use pillars and ceilings to make a path of sorts between point B and A.       That is as much as I can share atm, I don't have the time to finish. It also doesnt help that the next bit requires pictures to explain. Basically I found a new build mechanic I wasn't aware of.

[Cymas]

There are a few pillar tricks out there. My favorite is the one to make floors without any pillar nipples. It does require a fair amount of extra resources though, which is why no matter the final material I always "sketch" my foundations out in thatch and wood. Basically you set up all of your pillars with thatch ceilings first, then place the ceilings made out of the desired materials on top of the thatch. Yank the thatch out from below and ta-da, perfect smooth elevated floor. Just be careful not to accidentally demo the ceiling above by accident, that can happen.

There's also the pillar spacing trick where you can make larger gaps between the pillars. I last used this for our large bird aviary, so even if our quetz glitch and fall through the bottom, they aren't actually stuck in the pillars and can be walked/flown out. To do this one you first want to do the first step for smooth floors above, but also make sure you place your pillars "offset", that is, not where you want them in the final design. Then replace the pillars, but leave a 2 ceiling gap between them, not every other. Pillars can support 2 ceilings out, the problem is you can never place that third ceiling to set a new pillar unless you build from multiple directions in, which is all but impossible with current building mechanics (ie terrain issues). Do make sure to set pillars at the edge of wherever the door points are, especially if you're using ramps, as they actually need that extra support.

Another one is the "floating" trick you can use to make elevated bridges/structures without needing a bazillion pillars. There's actually an example of this in one of the Redwoods-centric spotlights. Build your pillars and ceilings as low to the ground as possible, then run either walls or one line of pillars up as far as desired, then ceilings on top. The pillars might be a hundred feet below, but somehow they still support the attached ceilings lol. You can use it for bridges, hollow castle-style walls, etc. I recommend using it for actual bridges, especially ones spanning water, in conjunction with the pillar spacing trick in order to allow traffic like boats and aquatic animals to pass freely underneath.

You can use a modification of that last one to make giant ramps down the sides of cliffs/mountains too. I once made what I called a "spino deployment ramp" from the upper ridge of my old base directly into the bay below because I didn't want to have to go around. Built a massive gate into the bottom too so even gigas could pass freely underneath it as that area was the "road" around my base.

I just realized I know a lot of pillar tricks lol. That's what happens when you need level ground to use foundations, and what's the one thing that doesn't exist in Ark, level ground...

[DaEndGame]

After spending the last 7 odd months building and consequently being vexed by pillars, I have been sacrificing, disecting and crucifying them to learn their secrets and am glad to say I know all of these ones. I'm almost certain these are all then pillar tricks there are apart from lowing foundations with them on platform saddles and rafts.

I'm not kidding about the things I did to pillars.

 

The mechanic I found enables one to build curved bridges and ceilings without any walls! The best way I can describe it is that when sloped ceilings are placed down from ceilings and arre connected to a wall, the sloped ceiling will then be supporting the ceiling. Remove the supports for the ceiling and you should hopefully see what I mean.  

[DaEndGame]

So I got a picture of the top of Lightwood House, which actually shows this mechanic.

Those stone ceilings are only connected to the structure by the sloped ceiling. If I were to strip away those turrets and leave only the walls that the sloped ceilings are connected to the whole roof would still stand. 

BTW this roof was like a nightmare from hell, especially the middle part of if.

[JackD05]

Wow, lightwood house looks amazing! I have always wanted to build houses but I can never find the location lol.