I made a post about this on the Beta discussion, but decided that it was rushed and didn't fit there to begin with. So, I'm going to go step by step on how a high level player can design, build, and expand structures while taking the drudgery out of the experience. I.) The Design Desk interacting with the design desk warps you to a 'virtual' environment. I imagine the transition having the environment (except your avatar and the desk) fading to black, and a green wireframe background extending in all directions from the desk to a finite, but reasonably large enclosed space. For ease of movement, you can 'swim' in this environment without the risk of drowning, no platforms placed everywhere needed. At this point, you can interact with the desk to set the 'baseline' or the point where construction goes aboveground or underground, the construction beacon (this is to aid in placement), save/load designs, or return to the real world. The only materials you have to build with are the ones that exist in your inventory at the time you enter the virtual space. Upon exiting, the materials placed are returned to your inventory and the design plans are saved as a blueprint item. II.) Construction Node The Construction Node is a crafting object that does 3 things, it is a large storage unit for raw materials and other items (Feedstock), on par with your own inventory. It creates Construction Drones and Beacons from a secondary feedstock inventory for this purpose. Finally, the Node has a fuel requirement, which has a tertiary inventory for this purpose. Now, let's go through the steps: 1.) Craft and place Node at the construction site. 2.) Input Design Blueprint, which dispenses a Beacon. 3.) Place the Beacon, which generates a ghost or hologram of the finished structure over the environment. 4.) Instruct the node to produce X number of Drones and whether to maintain that number (more on this later) 5.) Execute the project (will not execute if there are insufficient materials/fuel) III.) Defending the site Using the Construction Node has drawbacks, namely, the noise attracting mobs that will attack the Drones until they can no longer be replaces. Thus, building guard robots or defending it yourself is a good idea. This method makes city planning easier and more modular, especially if you design interlocking modules to make cities as needed.
I like this. I could design a prefab house to put down when I beam down to a new planet, and I wouldn't have to build it, only defend. However, I don't know if this would be possible. If it is, great. If not,
Another idea I had is that for initial teleports onto a planet, instead of the megaman drop in, you are in a drop pod that hits the surface and leaves a teleport pad like the one on the ship, which can be picked up and moved.
Seem like something that could be done, a tool which you select two reference points and it saves it as a blueprint of sorts then a constructor that builds it over time being fed the materials needed.
Precisely, and if you can have a transporter room of sorts with a placable teleport pad, you can build it away from your initial drop point.
