I made the game and I sometimes feel this way too. Here are a few suggestions based on what you're describing:

- Try to think of ways to let gravity hold your parts in place. Build jigs to measure squareness, stack wood as a platform, etc. Find a way that you can arrange the parts without touching them. (This may not be easy in challenge mode with limited resources)

- Start the nails in the wood before trying to position it to nail it together with another part. Just tap a nail once, then you can position the wood to where it needs to be and finish driving it in.

- You can reposition the table vises around the table. These can be used in addition to the hand clamps to hold down wood. Note: You cannot clamp the miter blocks in either the table vises your hand clamps. You can use the hand clamp to fasten wood to the workbench top though.

Originally posted by wooden-robot:

I made the game and I sometimes feel this way too. Here are a few suggestions based on what you're describing:

- Try to think of ways to let gravity hold your parts in place. Build jigs to measure squareness, stack wood as a platform, etc. Find a way that you can arrange the parts without touching them. (This may not be easy in challenge mode with limited resources)

- Start the nails in the wood before trying to position it to nail it together with another part. Just tap a nail once, then you can position the wood to where it needs to be and finish driving it in.

- You can reposition the table vises around the table. These can be used in addition to the hand clamps to hold down wood. Note: You cannot clamp the miter blocks in either the table vises your hand clamps. You can use the hand clamp to fasten wood to the workbench top though.

Any chance we can get something like wood glue? Basically, you draw a line (or a dot) of glue similar to how the pencil is used and have it's position confirmed the same way a nail does (by holding the trigger for a few seconds) to help with alignment, and it holds something in place just well enough for you to start nailing stuff in. Would be a nice QoL. Like, wood glue won't count towards a finished build that you need to turn in, only nails will do this, but wood glue will help you keep things in place.

In my personal opinion, it doesn't need to be "realistic" in how it operates, it just needs to work kind of similarly to the weld tool in Garry's Mod.

Yeah, I've thought about something like what you are talking about. The problem this causes is it doesn't play nicely with the current single point fastening system of nails and clamps. Glue would act like a line (or surface area) fastener, which would require a significant rethink on how everything fits together and then destructively comes apart when sawed through.

Originally posted by wooden-robot:

Yeah, I've thought about something like what you are talking about. The problem this causes is it doesn't play nicely with the current single point fastening system of nails and clamps. Glue would act like a line (or surface area) fastener, which would require a significant rethink on how everything fits together and then destructively comes apart when sawed through.

Would it be possible to reuse the code that nails use to fasten something in place, and the code used for a hammer taking out the nail, but take out the part of the code that counts it towards project completion, and retool it to work for a wood glue-esque system?

Basically instead of the prefab in the engine being a nail, it'd be an invisible prefab that uses some of the nail's code that activates when someone holds wood in the place they want to align it into, and then they press the trigger to "hammer in a nail to keep two objects in place, but not count towards project completion, and when the player presses trigger upon grabbing it again, a hammer's nail remover is used" as far as the engine is concerned.

It's difficult to explain through text. The nails themselves have no bearing on project scoring. (You can have nails all over the place, or only a few - doesn't affect the score)

The issue would be sawing. If I have two boards glued together along a long face and I saw through both of them, I'd expect the two new halves to be composed of two boards still glued together. The logic involved with deciding what sticks to what after a slice is greatly complicated when you are not using point fasteners like nails. For example, to test what nail goes on the right side or the left side of a slice is fairly trivial.

Originally posted by wooden-robot:

It's difficult to explain through text. The nails themselves have no bearing on project scoring. (You can have nails all over the place, or only a few - doesn't affect the score)

The issue would be sawing. If I have two boards glued together along a long face and I saw through both of them, I'd expect the two new halves to be composed of two boards still glued together. The logic involved with deciding what sticks to what after a slice is greatly complicated when you are not using point fasteners like nails. For example, to test what nail goes on the right side or the left side of a slice is fairly trivial.

Ah, okay, I think I understand, then. Oh well.