Is there a way to toggle block placement size? I saw a few other mods that do it 5x5 7x7 etc, but they can't be toggled and you have to unsub to get back to 2x2.

Same button as turning into a ball, F by default

i'm a little confused by the 'head tech' where do i find that?

also i didnt know better matter manipulater existed
and i have no mods that change the functionality of the mtter manipulater.. only the astechics

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
i already wanna favourite this mod after seeing the pictures
i will ADORE this mod so much...
now just to add freecam and noclip for admin to make it perfect

> You are actually really spot on with that answer

Does that mean it's working? Great! I tried hard to make BM play well with other mods, so I was wondering wtf could have messed that up.

> coding weapons

Weapons are JSON data IIRC, but I'm guessing you mean adding scripting. It helps to have programming familiarity; Lua's simple but learning it in context of a game is harder. Plus Starbound's odd: its modding is powerful because it's mostly in Lua and "modding" is just overwriting stuff.

Try playing with something simpler like TIC-80 to start, then Starbound modding later. Or if you need beginner programming learning, look up "How to Design Programs", then try Lua after. Not Lua, but a good beginner book.

Also, extract base game assets and mods, learn from them. For BM it's even easier: follow github link and read it. I included lots of comments explaining what/why, and an "Implementation" doc with an overview of what's going on because I did some unusual stuff to make it work.

You are actually really spot on with that answer, and i see what you mean, my apologies.

As for your second question, it was coding weapons, i tried replacing a Sniper Rifle and thought i did right but sadly i didn't either it did not appear with crafting or /spawnitem and if i tinkered around more it would crash SB so i gave up with trying that.

Oh, in the off chance this might help: keep in mind that you have to have the MM upgrade panel closed for the BM hotkeys to work. It's a safety measure to keep MM size from getting broken/out of sync in a way that's not hostile to other mods.

> Besides, you dealt with something I tried messing with once, and I refused to ever touch again.

Yeah? Now I'm curious, what part was it you tried to mess with, and what made you never want to try again?

> Well it's more of the mod that does load but your tech takes the higher priority which disables the mod i'm using

Out of curiosity, what mod? "Aurora's SB 1.4 mod"? If so, I just installed it to test, and it + improved techs + build mode all existed in harmony: using distortion sphere, when build mode is toggled off in the MM panel, Aurora's noclip and teleport work, and when it's toggled on, the up/down resizes the MM instead. And since Aurora doesn't touch the other spheres, they just swap between normal behaviour and BM size changing.

The monkeypatching worked, only down side is you can't use noclip and build mode simultaneously; the noclip disables temporarily while noclip is on for some reason, which is a minor inconvenience but at least they don't break each other.

Not sure if you're using a different mod, or if there's something else at play here.

Well it's more of the mod that does load but your tech takes the higher priority which disables the mod i'm using, i use it for noclipping n' such but unfortunately with it lacking priorities i can't, i understand not redoing the mod for the sake of some folk so do please have a good time! Besides, you dealt with something I tried messing with once, and I refused to ever touch again.

You're welcome, I've been a gentleman to the people who make these tools for convenience and will continue, even if people use this characteristic against me.

@Jase V.

It patches all vanilla spheres, not just default, so you should already be able to use any of them. It's the same Lua script applied to each vanilla sphere, so they retain normal behaviour while also passing on keypress data.

It should even work with your modded sphere, since it monkeypatches functions by storing the originals and calling them so that original behaviour is not lost. That's why it can use the same 100-line script for all four vanilla spheres with no code duplication. I don't support arbitrary mods because I can't troubleshoot for everyone, but I know it works in general because I use Improved Techs and it's fine.

The only reason it shouldn't work is if the other mod has an even higher priority value than Build Mode, replacing it completely. I gave it a priority of 9999 intending to avoid that, but maybe something else went even higher. You can try unpacking the BM pak and raising the _metadata priority some more.

Finally, thanks for the kind words :D

Great tool you made man, just wish i didn't have something that also uses the regular sphere as well and cancels that out, otherwise i'd be able to perfectly make whatever to my heart's content,
You think it'd be hard to make it happen for another sphere? Just curious is all.

@yolo.jr there is a mod on the workshop that can do what you are asking for. It is called "base in a box."

@yolo.jr it would be tricky to do unless Starbound's modding API supports direct tile replacement, and I'm not sure it does. even if it is supported, such a mod might be very laggy since it would probably have to scan/replace all blocks in the target area in a single tick (I don't think there's good concurrency support here)

copy and paste buildings

why isnt there a mod fo starbound wich is like minecrafts schematica schematics

Yeah, once I removed the zoom feature since it was impossible to fix/reimplement (thanks for nothing, Chucklefish) it was simple to get the rest of it working again. Still disappointed I had to do that but the rest of the mod's useful despite it, and trying to play without it was frustrating :)

> thanks for sharing your source on github.

No problem at all. I did some unorthodox things to make the hotkeys feature work so it seemed obvious I should post the code so that I could also document the approach I took alongside it. Though TBH, not sharing it is kind of pointless in Starbound; it's all there and extractable in the downloadable mods anyway.

by the way, thanks for sharing your source on github. Always nice to see

oh, you fixed it? Nice! In that case, subscribed :-)

WAIT HOW WAS MY FIRST COMMENT 3 MINS AGO?

OK IT WASENT

YES.
THIS IS 100% NEEDED.
NOW I JUST HOPE THAT THIS ISENT THE MOD THAT CRASHES THE GAME BEFORE THE CHUCKLEFISH(AS IN TOO MANY MODS)

lol

Nah, nothing bad. I originally intended to give it an additional negative effect of some sort, so I named the status effect accordingly to imply a mix of pros and cons (do something good but risky) but decided against that when I started testing it. From personal experience with it I decided that accidentally destroying too much, like flooding your ocean lab, because you got lazy about not toggling it off again was risky enough without adding artificial limitations :)

right i thought it was something really bad

> what is build mode overload?

From the description above: "[Build Mode] adds an overload mode toggle that increases the manipulator's tile damage when activated." Also, if you hover over the [?] next to the build mode toggle in the Matter Manipulator UI in-game it's described there as well. What that means is when you activate the overload effect, the matter manipulator removes blocks much faster.

If you're asking why it exists as a toggle, it's because I wanted an optional block destruction speed increase that, when active, destroys nearly any block almost instantly to speed up things like reshaping caves or fixing mistakes made with blocks that are slow to remove normally.

It's enabled separately of the build mode toggle because instant block removal makes it easier to accidentally do undesirable things like destroy part of a building or flood an ocean base with a misclick, so it's better to use it responsibly and only turn it on when needed.

what is build mode overload?

A friend talked me into playing again and not having my mod working was bothering me, so I spent some time figuring out if I could salvage it or not. The good news is I was able to save most of it, just had to figure out some things they changed that broke stuff temporarily.

The bad news is Chucklefish never did add anything to the API to cover the missing functionality they gutted in 1.3, so the zoom hotkey feature is gone forever. There's just no way to get at the zoom setting to modify it programmatically any more. I'm still annoyed about that, but it could be worse; at first it looked like they killed off the trick I used for hotkeys as well, but that still worked after figuring out what they changed.

TL;DR: I fixed it so the mod should work again for everyone.

I second vindurza's question. This is the first result when I search "building". wish there was a workshop filter for different versions of the game...

seeing that this has been discontinued anyone know of alternatives?

Ok

Sorry, no, it does not; Chucklefish made some API changes that made it impossible for the mod to continue to exist as it was, and to fix it I would have had to neuter most of what made it appealing to me. I tried contacting them a few times to hopefully work out a way to keep the needed API features without the security problems they removed them for, but they never responded, so I cut my losses and abandoned the mod.

Ultimately, I made the mod to make building more fun to me without breaking normal gameplay, so losing it made building a lot less fun, and I eventually quit playing the game as a result as well. :/

So this mod doesn't work anymore?

Before I subscribe to your your mod was wondering does this mod let you grab anything like a creative mode or something like that?

Pls don't dis am just wondering ( I've never used/downloaded a mod before...)

Compatability with quickbar when?

Maybe it's a good idea to put something along the lines of "Broken as of update 1.3" in the title then?

More like can't, as I've stated a few times already. The closest thing to a "fix" I could do is to spend a bunch of time removing features because important API calls got removed, plus having to work around whatever else may have broken since then, just to release an "update" that's a regression and completely useless to me. Sorry, it's a no-win right now. CF had a security issue of sorts with how they implemented the config read/set API, which I used, and instead of fixing their problem with some finesse they just obliterated it completely because it was quicker.

If somebody else wants to release a neutered version, there's nothing stopping them; I've had the source up with a link from the summary since I put the mod online. I'm just not interested in doing it, preferring to wait and see what (if anything) comes along to replace the missing config API.

so you won't fix this mod? because i subscribed ealier and i couldn't find the optics or whatever you suggested in the descrption, and i'd like to use this mod for building and stuff

> "it should have just been replaced with a bunch of small API calls [...] but that's probably a lot of work."

Another, less time-consuming way, would be to have the setConfiguration and getConfiguration calls only return a whitelisted subset of configuration options that are safe for mods to toggle. The problem was that it was exposing the entire config JSON structure to mods, but there's no reason it MUST do that, it was just the easy way out. Exposing a safe subset via the (ex-)existing API calls would work equally well with much less work than trying to add new API calls for every possible config setting.

I tried suggesting this before, because I believe that's what they should have done instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by removing everything, but I guess it got lost.

Regardless, thanks for trying. I'm still hoping they eventually figure out the above ^ and re-instate the necessary configuration knobs, but it's not something I expect to happen any time soon.

I've made a post on the Starbound Forums, and I've gotten a response explainingthat "that particular API call (for changing the configuration of the game) could potentially allow mods to turn off safe operation of mods."

It's a shame that it broke your mod, which was completely safe, but at least it's a reason. He also explained that "it should have just been replaced with a bunch of small API calls that allow all the safe things from the configuration to be accessed and modified, but that's probably a lot of work."

Regardless, I hope they add some sort of replacement for that API call in update 1.4!

> Is there any set reason why you don't want to make a compatability patch for the two mods?

The problem is that, as of 1.3, Chucklefish made changes to Starbound that broke Build Mode in a way I can't fix until they re-implement some API calls they removed. Nothing to do with other mods, I just have no desire to "fix" the mod when the only fix it currently is to neuter it by removing much of what makes it useful. I tried communicating with CF hoping to get the necessary functionality restored to the game, but I never got a response and gave up after a few months of trying.

This mod is such a good mod, but the incompatabilities with EMM make it unusuable. Is there any set reason why you don't want to make a compatability patch for the two mods?

Yeah, sorry. I haven't had much (any) motivation to mess with this since 1.3 launched and broke everything. I was already annoyed that, with 1.3, Chucklefish removed some mod API functions that Build Mode relies on, because I don't like when devs remove useful features; but then I spent MONTHS trying to get a response on why it was done, trying to communicate why those functions, or something similar, are important and maybe get the functionality restored, with no response at all.

Build Mode's full functionality requires those functions, and I had some plans that also needed them, so I'm stuck. Fixing things means removing much of what made the mod interesting, and I don't want to do that. I added hotkey zoom adjustment because it felt like a necessary part of improved building, and without it the whole thing just feels incomplete. :/

I keep waiting, hoping for something that will make it possible to keep things working the way they're supposed to, but so far, nothing. Maybe 1.4…

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Nvm, figured it out. Unpacked the assets via command prompt, edited the defaultparameters.config, repacked. Works. :)

How did you go about doing the 'shift+place' patch because I'm trying to get a larger radius for placing blocks.

Would you please chech if it works correct with quickbar mini? Checkbox seems to not showing up

I don't think it's possible, but I'm not certain. Placing blocks seems to only be an MM interaction, without many (any?) other ways to do it. The game is pretty strict about MM stuff.

There's one thing that seemed to have some promise, but I didn't get anywhere with it. I mentioned changing build size with a config.patch: that's done with the "blockRadius" and "altBlockRadius" keys in /items/defaultParameters.config. I originally wanted to change those defaults temporarily, but it turns out there's no way to do so in-game.

Anyway, since it's a list of all the default settings for items, it MAY be possible to take an existing block type (e.g. dirt), override the default blockRadius with a custom value on-the-fly, and create, essentially, a new block type that can be placed in larger chunks.

No idea if that will work, though; I didn't pursue it further because mangling item types was way, way out of build mode's scope. Even if it works, it may do weird things. Completely untested.

Hmm... I wonder if it'd be possible to make a tool that places blocks in a higher radius. Maybe it would have an extra slot for the blocks, kinda like how fishing rods have reel and lure slots? This would be separate from the MM.

Sorry, that's not possible as far as I'm aware. I looked into it before and found no way to do it programmatically. It's possible to change the build radius values — regular and shift+place — with a config.patch tweak, but it was an all-or-nothing thing with no way to control the radius in-game.

There might be some kind of hackjob workaround for it with some clever trickery to make it happen, but it's not something to get hopeful about. I did something like that to get hotkeys+zoom working and Chucklefish broke it on me with 1.3. Still trying to get someone to communicate with me about that so I can hopefully save the feature, but no luck so far. :/