A Skyplot Full of Headache

Tags

building, decor, design, house build, housing, medical center, ohgodithurts, roleplay location, rp, skyplot, wildstar

I have a plan.

I have a vision.

After finally having put up the walls, I also now have crossed eyes and probably am bleeding out of my ears.  In short, building a large, cohesive house in WildStar is becoming one of the most exhausting, frustrating and rewarding experiences I have ever had in any MMO in immediate memory.

Who knew four walls would add up to so much?

As I stated before, the intention for this Skyplot was to make a hospital and research station–a place for my character and other medically-leaning RP’ers to arrive and perform research, or to use as a backdrop or staging area for some medical emergency matters.  Ultimately, it’s not a place of full leisure, though the Terrarium I’ve put together would qualify the most as a place for downtime.

The Terrarium was the first feature I built after the entrance area, and also features some of the highest walls I had put together in the game.  Most of the walls in question are Chua, with the ground being made in to the Eldan Tech floor.  The glass roof overhead is one of two locations in the plot that allow for natural sunlight.

Building the walls of the Terrarium was simple enough, with the addons I was using.  I initially started off using Katia’s Builder addon, but soon included Housing Toolbox Pro and Housing Decor Set Builder…and then Katia’s was pretty much left utterly to the wayside, as the UI wasn’t terribly convenient and I found myself not using its features very much, if at all.  Toolbox Pro also just made more sense to me.

This is where the tears began.  There wasn’t any piece of decor or building material that had a half-circle piece, and so I had to put together the hole between the wall and the glass roof with a bunch of individual Chua columns.  This.  Took.  HOURS to put together.  This also showed off where Katia’s wasn’t quite up to snuff in my needs.

First off, I had to place alternating platforms to jump up to in order to reach the right height to properly place the columns.  Then I had to arrange them as neatly as I could so that they would look like one whole piece without breaking the geometry of the edge of the glass roof.  Finally, I had to copy the first half over to the second, then pull a full copy of the first half-circle all the way over to the other side of the room.  At distance.

When I used Katia’s copy tool, it took the pieces apart haphazardly and didn’t pull over all the copies, so I had a fractured half-circle that ended up floating in midair.  It also decided to copy multiples of one column instead of all the columns, so I had to pull the extras away and crate or delete them one by one, making sure each column of the original half-circle didn’t include needless extra pieces.

In short, I broke Katia’s.  But the work was finally worth it, as I had a finished room that looked very complete to me.  After putting down some plants, grass and a couple of Garden FABkits, I had a full Terrarium.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The water feature I wanted to include because…well…there wasn’t any logical reason for there to be grass coming out of a metal floor unless I wrote some headcanon of a water source.  And, so, I put together a rough waterfall system with a pump at the side and a large grate that captured the running water.  In my fiction, the water continually runs and filters, while pipes just below the surface feed in to some topsoil that keeps the plants watered and healthy.  It didn’t seem beyond the pale for this sort of tech to exist in the game, since most of it usually features some unique pastiche of science fiction tech and steampunk overcomplication.

This was another feature that took a while, but only because of one of the more annoying quirks of WildStar’s housing.  While some FABkits don’t have invisible walls, others do.  Such as the entrance ramp.  Since I wasn’t able to remove it or adjust it in any way, I had to build around it.  A few Cassian half-tubes, some snarling and a couple of hours finally gave me a round entrance room.  Later, I was finally able to put a Cassian dome overhead to give it a roof.

The first thing you see when entering the plot is this Medpack, which I have sized and arranged to look like a sign.  I find it’s a pretty clever use of the prop, and have had inspiration to use other “unintended” decor pieces as signs to help guide visitors around to where features of the center are located.

Ideally, the intent will be made clear, since there’s no actual letters I can use.

As I was putting together roof pieces, I realized that the tiles I was using could also double as a floor for a second story.  This completely adjusted my original line of thinking, and also adjusted the flow of the plot.  I built up some hallways leading to the Terrarium, the underground bunker which will likely be primary research, a reception/waiting room, a small basic clinic area and a large surgery and ICU area.  From the ground floor of ICU, I put in some stairs which led to a second story that has these tiles as a floor.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with said second story, but it does lead in to…

This bad boy.  This is the Quarantine Research area, which is a construct I build around the invisible walls of the Strain Lab FABkit.  It features glass tubes around the outside for an observation deck, and one entrance ramp that leads down in to a Clean Room for entry and exit.

This was another feature that took forever–days, actually–to complete.  But the arduous task of putting my Terrarium together readied me for putting this up.  I wanted the walls here to be angled to make it look and feel like a trap–a place you couldn’t climb out of or escape through conventional means.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to put a roof on top due to the invisible walls.  I also wasn’t able to put the Fire Trail decor pieces I acquired from the zPrix event because I had no space between my walls and the FABkit’s.  The reason I wanted this was to sort of have a reason why the Technophage hadn’t spread to other parts of the plot.  But I assume that the explanation of “It’s a controlled growth” will just have to do.

Also, my Clean Room needs work–right now it’s merely a tube with a Technophage Door leading in to it.  There isn’t any feature or item I can come up with that gives the impression that you’re walking through a scrubbing agent.

Despite these shortcomings, however, I am incredibly pleased with how this feature came together.

So I finally have it built.  After about maybe three or four weeks worth of fiddling, adjustment, changing plans and dried eyes, I have my center built.

…now I just have to start decorating it.  Oh God….

If you’d like to visit this plot and you’re on Entity, it’s free and open to the public.  Just search for the house of Kael Dashwind and you’ll arrive at the entry ramp to Dashwind Labs.  And, of course, if anyone reading this happens to be a WildStar Skyplot design maven and has suggestions for decor and design, I am all ears.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.