by Dakkan » Thu Apr 01, 2021 8:08 am Enter:
With all current ideas dead, why not mooch off a big botty village? Get pampered and showered with free resources?
The lead up:
In previous worlds I always wanted to build a giant cool graveyard as well, but they were never a major project. W10 was just off to the side of the pyramid, and W11 they were scattered around the island at several different sites. I always liked the Black and White graveyards though, how the graves were in uneven arcs. Since corpses were magically appearing around me, it seemed like a perfect project.
So begins an absolute shitfest of no planning and bad outcomes.
I learned my lesson W11 about starting something too big. So a 1 map tile sized project seemed reasonable. That is the same size as the base of the W10 pyramid. Also there wasn't very many spots in the village I could use, lots of quarries and caves, my bane.
Note the location, at a corner of the inner curtain wall. Sure hope I don't plan to make it any bigger!
Dirt piled up quickly once I stole a metal shovel from someone. Luckily another villager was stealing my dirt for their own, puny, project. I sure hope I don't ever need dirt in large amounts!
Progress was surprisingly fast, when there was porridge to steal.
Around here is where people stopped stealing my dirt and I had to start dumping it manually. I sure hope I don't ever need that dirt back!
Some of the first graves on the "upper" terraces.
As I got deeper it was apparent that for everything I wanted at the bottom, it wouldn't be as deep as I really wanted.
Finally I caved and used a script to auto-drop dirt for 2 days. SURE HOPE I DON'T EVER NEED LARGE VOLUMES OF DIRT!!! (This was the only time I used anything even approaching a "bot".)
Around here is where I started digging up really nice equipment regularly, as if there was a murder farm nearby that just dropped dead hearthlings equipment right onto the ground instead of saving it. I really wish I stopped here. It would have been decent sized and looked nice.
Note that I can't just dig deeper because immediately adjacent to this is a quarry and a cave entrance, both anchoring the land to their elevation. But what if I maybe raise the terrain immediately adjacent to the hole, and give the illusion that it's deeper? A rim would be kinda cool too, right? Plus there's plenty of leftover dirt I haven't finished dumping to use.
That dot is definitely a fresh corpse in the corpse waiting pile.
Note the palisade in the way that I'm ignoring. At the time there was that dumb issue with no cascade working.
Hey, looking decent! I sure wish I stopped here as well, just finish up and make it look nice. But no. Then came the outward spiral idea.
Notice that the damn palisade is still in the way.
Even with all those, it still took a while to remodel.
GIT THAT DIRT
Unfortunately, around now I suffered a severe assassination attempt.
With the huge volume of porridge I went through, someone tainted my supply and nearly killed me before I noticed.
This arc is terrible. Big thanks to Flyrella for helping me pave a much smoother outward spiral! You can see how I measured an approximate increase in radius at each quarter turn, with paving on the minimap. This came into play later, but didn't work out.
Okay, here is the problem side. Can't move quarry or cave entrance. My plan was to have the upward ramp become a gradual wild mountainous ridge, or something.
This diagram is shit but so is the outcome.
Here you can see the original uniform rim, and the revised gradual increase paved at the base.
Look how smoothly that increases in width.
Unfortunately at this point everything fell apart, worse than it had been already. Or rather, I could see problems coming that wouldn't just be handwaved away. I hate when numbers don't work out right. The plan was to do similar to the pyramid W10, where I made the ramps by taking the mid-point between the top and bottom of a ramp, and raise the terrain halfway. Repeat between that midway point and either end, raise the terrain halfway again. Here I would take the increase in radius of the outward spiral from the inner ground level circle, and the loss of flat terrain from height, and find out how much elevation per quarter turn. Then go to the midpoint of each quarter turn and raise the terrain halfway again. Repeat until smooth.
None of the numbers were close at all, and it would have looked like shit.
Part of the problem is that, obviously, you can't just pave a circle and use the survey tool to increase elevation around it and expect to keep a circle. This actually results in a square with beveled edges the further up you go. As you approach infinity it's just a square hole. More importantly the biggest difference is where I was measuring from, so huge error at the top.
But I like ignoring problem and just keep working.
I really liked the lightning and shadows in winter. Couldn't really do much during then though.
Here you can see how the outer spiral instead became a terraced sort of mess. At least that way you could do something with the different levels.
For the graves, I always wanted to have the majority of bodies in the hole, and then have fancier bodies on the terraces, and then later up on the slopes, in custom plots. (Sorry Carthur) But then there was pressure to bury corpses asap because I live with monsters. So immediately the fancy terraces were occupied because they were dug first. Other than a few folk, a lot of the names were alt-y sounding. Also, the fancier folk who were... found dead and brought inside, Snail would hide so I couldn't place them anywhere. In the end it didn't matter because the design was such a failure, anyway. Most of these fancy bodies are unburied still.
OH! And one major skeleton-theme decoration, skull totems, were never made. I just hate how they're currently handled in game, and begged Jorb and Loftar to change it throughout the world, but no luck. They're 100% larp, contribute nothing to the deceased hearthling and nothing to the player building the totem. They should at least retain the player data so you can inspect them when you build it. "Who's skull is this, in this totem?" Or something. Between Snail and I, we probably have 5+ white skull stockpiles. The wagon update to keep the interface was glorious, but came at the tail end of all this. And the loss of a real client like Amber really slowed me down.
A big thank you to Boshaw for helping me get some increased view distance pictures. Even at the last minute he quickly updated with another feature to help me out. I wish I could have done this for the W10 pyramid, though I fear it would have made me sad how small it looks once you can truly zoom out as much as you want. Keep in mind the size from the above pictures where you could barely see the edges of the original hole. W10 pyramid could fit into this hole! Suddenly you can see everything! (The client just doesn't unload stuff, so things beyond your view distance are just frozen in time from when you saw them last. Calm down sprucecaps.) I could write a lot on just how amazing it was to play with this false view distance, the game is really hurt buy the minuscule view distance that we all take for granted.
Well over a thousand logs here, for example.
Here's a good overall view of the final incline's terraces.
Here you can see my thoroughly sieged plot. Snail sieged me with a ----- and changed my windmill colors. I haven't used it all since then, except for horse storage.
The moral of the story to future folks is to avoid gigantic helical inclined planes in H&H. I've seen some amazing small stuff with a natural feel to it,(Once. I've seen it once.) but it's just a nightmare to scale up and try and make perfect.
Before the big reveal, I want to thank dicktown villagers for the support and resources they provided, even if they didn't know I was taking them.
And a big thank you to corpses like you!
Now, the center:
