Got a problem, specifically painting.

[Migelthesloth 5]

Hi, so I started another huge building project a few days ago. As all my projects, I started in Explore mode, just because I think building in it is much more exciting and rewarding than in creative mode. What I was going for this time was a southern-states Mansion, heavily inspired by  Dunleith Mansion, Natchez, Mississippi. Look it up, it's a gorgeous building.  After placing the outer ring (Pillars and foundation), I started constructing the west wall of the first floor. These were SINGLE plank blocks.

So I haven't worked with paint in Explore mode before. Now here's the issue: Painting a SINGLE block takes six white pigments. Mortaring a white plant gives you ten white pigments.  Let's be generous, say every block needs half a plant. Making two floors worth of walls, a balcony, the foundation and the pillars from SINGLE blocks is... A LOT of paint required. I'm not gonna do any maths, I choose sizes how I think they look good, not based on measurements. But I'll say, that's thousands, tens of thousands of pigments. I found 200 spawned in a structure, and it was really not much. Getting tens of thousands of these plants would be a massive grind. I do realize you can technically exponentially increase the amount of plants gained by just breaking them down into seeds and replanting them, but even that would be a LOT of work. The planting animation is slow, and breaking stuff down is a chore. While at it, I think Ylands needs automation. Something to rapidly farm low-value items while you are off doing something else. Automatic mining drills, crafting stations, industrial furnaces, grinders, all that stuff.

So what would you recommend me to do? Is there a way to cheat items (Pigments)? Can I change the mode into creative? Or should I just abandon this project all together?

Whatever the case, I probably won't be doing big builds like this in Explore mode anymore. Whenever I tried something unusual, there was always something holding me back. So many failed projects. Well, thanks for any tips.

[handofthesly 211]

You could load the save into the editor and place a chest and fill it with stacks of the pigments that you need. Pigments stack to 999 from memory and you could place them in a Pigment Jar to save space.

[Baz Foobar 102]

In addition to what handofthesly suggestion, you could drop the Creator Cube in to your save game, then you can toggle between Explore/Create simply by equipping or removing the cube from your body.

[Onedown 28]

On 3/1/2018 at 3:38 PM, Migelthesloth said:

I do realize you can technically exponentially increase the amount of plants gained by just breaking them down into seeds and replanting them, but even that would be a LOT of work.

Get a program called autohotkey.  You can easily write a script to plant seeds while you sip coffee or whatnot if you know a tiny bit of basic programming.  I have found this very useful having disabled hands where repetitive clicking is impossible for me.  You can also easily write a script to harvest the plants after they grow.  if it is allowed by the devs I will share the very basic scripts I used for this purpose but i won't post them without express permission from the dev team.  These scripts in no way allow unattended gameplay as the stack limit of 100 seeds requires a restart every time the stack runs out.  Autohotkey is a godsend for people like me who would be unable to enjoy a lot of games without it and best of all it's free and takes up only a tiny amount of system resources.