Plant Creation Instructions

This tutorial is intended for folks that backed a Kickstarter reward tier that includes designing a plant for inclusion in the game.

Before you start, you may want to spend some time building spaceships in the main game to get familiar with the editor interface. By the end of this tutorial you will have built a space plant and exported it to a file for easy emailing.

Step 1. Select "Sandbox" from the main game menu.

There are a few console commands in here but nothing too scary.

Step 2. Spawn existing plants

With the mouse cursor over the console / command line window in the upper left corner of the screen, type:

fleetp 13

And press Enter. You can pan the camera around with W, A, S, D and zoom with the mouse wheel. (make sure the mouse is not over the console while panning or zooming)

If you accidently press ESC and close the console, just press '\' to open it again

Step 3. Switch to editing mode

With the mouse cursor NOT over the console, press '3' to put the sandbox into block editing mode

You can return to the default mode with '2'.

Save your work in the sandbox with 'control-s'

Step 4. Build your plant by dissecting pieces from existing plants

The deploy location

The alt-drag editor clone tool is particularly useful here. Another potentially useful console command is 'mi 3' - this will spawn nicely arranged rows of each available plant block. Make sure to double click to move the editor deploy location prior to running the command

Important plant constraints:

  1. The base of each plant must be a seed block. This is where it will attach to the asteroid. The base port of the root seed must not be attached to anything, and no other part of the plant can extend below the root seed.
  2. Plants may or may not have additional seed blocks at the tips of their leaves. These seeds will launch off and create more plants in-game. These seeds must be attached to the plant by their base port, and nothing else may be attached to these seeds. See the image below for an example of proper seed attachement
  3. Plants should not have thrusters
  4. Try not to add excessive numbers of missiles or lasers.
  5. The large plant pod is a good upper bound on the maximum size of plants.

You can test your plant by double clicking to select it and then pressing '1' to go into flying mode. Left click to shoot lasers, right click to launch missiles, and press '3' to return to building mode.

Don't forget to save frequently! You can also undo with 'control-z'

Step 5. Export your plant

Double click on your completed plant to select it. A cyan rectangle should surround the plant. Now, with the mouse pointer over the console, type:

export "my_awesome_plant"

(Replace my_awesome_plant with the name of your new plant). This will create a file on your desktop called something like

Reassembly_(null)_-_my_awesome_plant_20150115_05.59.07.PM_[240P].lua

Email this file to arthur@anisopteragames.com I and will add it to the game.

Extra Step 6. More plant testing

Test deployment of seeds by attaching the plant to an asteroid and activating it. To spawn an asteroid:

asteroid

Attach the root seed to the asteroid. Make sure to make a copy of the plant before activation. To activate the plant:

activate

Extra Step 7. One more fun command

type fleet 8 to spawn fleet of spaceships. Replace 8 with 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, or 15 to spawn different factions. You can spawn bigger ships with something like fleet 15 10000 (the bigger the second number the bigger the ships)

To exit the sandbox, press ESC twice and select "Quit" from the menu