Shipyard menu with a preview ship
Shipyards construct new ships. Players can specify different parameters of the ship they want to build, like style, size, material and name.
Larger ships will have a longer building time within the shipyard, shown in the corner of the screen after confirming the purchase of a new ship.
Building New Ships
A player's relations to the faction owning the shipyard have to be good enough (at least neutral, mistrustful) in order to build a new ship.
For ship building, a procedural random generator creates a preview of a ship. The player may then change the parameters of the generator in order to customize the ship he wants to build. The ship that is going to be built can be seen in the shipyard window. Ships that are built with the same style, volume, scaling and seed will always be exact copies of each other. When a shipyard builds a ship, it will charge a construction fee. This fee depends on the relations of the player to the faction, if the relations are good, the fee is low. If the relations are bad, the fee is high.
Clicking on the button 'Build' will then start the building process of the ship. The time of the building process depends on the size of the ship that is to be built. A shipyard can only build 2 ships at the same time.
Parameters
There are several parameters that can be used to change the ship that will be built by the shipyard.
Volume
This parameter controls the complexity of a ship. The random generator will construct a ship based on a style and a volume, if the volume is high, the ship will be more likely to contain more blocks.
Scaling
After the generator created a ship based on the style and volume, it will be scaled by the scaling parameter.
Style
Every faction has its unique styles of building ships. The player can select a style from the available styles of the shipyard.
Seed
The seed is the initial value for the random generator that will produce the ship shown in the shipyard. Changing the seed will result in different variations of the ship that is to be built.
Material
The material that the ship will be made of.
Name
Players must give their ships names. As of version 0.5 this field is mandatory, and every name can only be used once.
Usage Examples
These parameters can be a little confusing, so here are some examples on how they may be used to build ships.
Big Bulky Ship
In order to build a big bulky ship, move the volume slider to the left and the scaling slider to the right. The generator will generate a ship that has a low number of blocks and then scale it to a higher size.
Small complex ship
In order to build a smaller, complex ship, move the volume slider to the right and the scaling slider to the left. The generator will generate a ship that has a high number of blocks and then scale it to a lower size.
Fleet with variation
Once a player has found a style he/she likes, the seed value can be used to create multiple ships of the same style, that will look slightly different.
For example, adjust volume and scaling to a value you like, then build a ship with seed 0. Then keep those values and build a ship with seed 1, then with seed 2 and so on. You will have lots of ships that will look similar, but are not exactly the same. On the other hand, keeping the seed value will let you build exact copies of your ships.