Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
10/3/2018 6:04:32 AM
Subject:
RE: brazil
Speaking of Brazil, last night I was improving Echo Lake Lumber in Far Harbor. This tells you that I'm nearing completion of my improvement tour, since the only places I hate more than the Far Harbor settlements are the Castle and Spectacle Island. I'm leaving them for dead last and may not pay attention to them at all.
Anyway, at Echo Lake Lumber there's a ruined timber mill, complete with logs resting on treadmills. It's an ingenious addition. You can see other logs floating out in the lake and a crane for lifting them onto the treadmills. It's like employees were milling the logs at the moment the bombs fell.
I thought the mill roof would be an excellent place for a guard house, as it faces a lakeshore thicket where wolves and other predators lurk. The problem was that Bethesda made the mill as more of a strange art object than an actual structure. It's all of one piece with very selective collision. In player mode, you can't pass through it. In workshop mode, you can't get anything to rest on it. I was trying to put some platforms on the roof to act as a level surface, but they clipped right through no matter what I did.
I realized that the only way to do what I wanted was to destroy the mill and rebuild it using similar pieces that come with the Far Harbor DLC. Beth actually encourages this destruction -- the whole structure is scrappable, which is odd. I'm not aware of any other in-game building that lets you do this.
I wanted to keep the logs and treadmills, so fortunately I was able to destroy only the walls and ceiling and then rebuild everything. It was uncanny how close it looked to the original -- almost a piece-for-piece match.
The upshot of this was that I could now have proper collision for my guard house supports without losing the look and feel of the mill. I made a darn cunning sentry structure exactly where and how I wanted, then assigned a settler to climb up there and watch for animals.
It was an extremely rare occurrence. Everything worked exactly as I had hoped. I thought I should chronicle the moment. I would have taken before-and-after screenshots if I had known how perfectly everything would turn out, but this report will have to do.
