W.I.P
It's important to check the relevant ship limit data that can be found on other pages of wiki such as the starship shield section, to know things such as shield amounts. It's important to consider how you will shield your ship before building in some cases especially if you want an effective ship. Shields can be placed in any position you want, but choose wisely because shield positioning can either boost your ships performance or it can make it worse by doing something silly like overlapping shields over a large area.
If there's an overlapped shield, all shields that are in the intersection once hit will all take the same amount of damage, the damage will not be divided. This means that all shields included in that overlap will now take up the ships power in regenerating shields resulting in inefficiency.
for ships that use a low amount of shields such as starfighters and gunships they often don't need to worry about this as much but for larger ships it's easiest to use box shielding to prevent overlap because ideally on your ship you want to use as many shields as you can that's within the limit while preventing overlap on the outside. This gets harder to do with the spherical shields as even the smallest one is quite large.
To make it easier to place shields you can map them out on a 2d plane before 3d using a mixture of boxes and //hcyl (see world edit in tips and tricks section) like so: image of top view of a ship mapping box shields
Based on the weight of the blocks used in your ship and their amounts it will determine a center to your ship which then when rotating during flight will do it based on that fixed positon.
Block weight scales linearly with blast resistance. We use custom blast resistances and they can be found elsewhere on another guide in the wiki.
Please see the Starships thrusters section of wiki for more info on engine types and speeds. The amount of armour blocks you use on a ship will greatly effect the speed. The amount of sticky pistons on your ship will also diminish its speed.
Armour blocks can be divided into 3 categories: heavy, light and none, They each provide different blast resistances but also the lighter the armour the faster your ship will be. example blast resistance list
Any double slabs, stairs, stained glass blocks, concrete, any of the blocks you see in multiblocks apart from area shields, and some few others are pilotable. You can check if you have doubts that something isn't pilotable you can check by using a test ship on the creative server. Simply use an existing ship or create a concrete sphere using the world edit tips and tricks section of this guide to quickly get a mass large enough to test with.
weapon placements are very important for ensuring a combat vessel performs well, poor weapon placement can result in said weapons getting destroyed easily, the weapons having their firing arc blocked, and some good weapon placements can even lead to an increase in accuracy. The ships energy capacity and which powermode you set your ship on determine your rate of fire. All light weapons use the same source of power so using two at the same time will take power from the other. Some weapons are locked on ships based on the class and size. For example, you can't have light turrets on a star fighter.
Every ship has a limit of storage blocks they can have on a ship, this is based on item slots and not the block type. The type of vessel also factors into the limit as warships have less than their trade ship counterparts.
Unless you're a jedi who doesn't need sight to sense their surroundings, I recommend building a cockpit, or a bridge.
**To edit your build you must first select the corner boundaries of the section you wish to edit using either //pos1 with //pos2, or you can select them by right and left clicking holding an axe given by //wand.
you can also select a specific parameter to use such as "-a" as the suffix to the command line to remove air from the selection, for example: //paste -a, or: //stack 50 -a
example images
When rotating it's important to know that your position effects the outcome of the rotaion so it's important to position yourself wisely as the following images demonstrate:
insert good and bad example
Rotating is done in degrees and will not always guarantee you perfect angles which is why I recommend you stick to factors of 90 (90,180,270,360), which provides good accuracy. Factors of 22.5, which provides decent accuracy. And finally 11.25, at the very most, which provides not as much accuracy, but can mostly be useful to gather information on correct positioning. image
You can rotate a shape on all axis by also inputting the other degrees into the command line such as: //rotate 0 90 0, //rotate 0 0 90, this means you can flip shapes in any direction you wish, sometimes is finicky to use but a general rule of thumb for success in this action is to position yourself at the outside corner of your selection so the command can understand better the direction you're trying to input since the command doesn't know the front faces of an object. For example, standing at the bottom left edge of a selection then running //copy, //rotate 0 90 0, //paste, will rotate the object around like a clock handle.
image
Stack is a command used to quickly copy and paste a selection in any given direction, it can also be used to make recurring diagonals like so:
images
and also can be used to make recurring shapes such as spirals for example, like so:
example image
copies the selection, it's important that you position your in-game character while typing this command if you're needing to paste it in an accurate position later.**
pastes the selection based on the location you typed //copy from in relation to the build.
There are multiple commands you can use to generate shape such as: cylinders, hollow cylinders, spheres, hollow spheres, pyramids, hollow pyramids. Here they are: //cyl, //hcyl, //sphere, //hsphere, //pyramid, //hpyramid. A full command would go like this: //hsphere magenta_stained_glass 9.5, where //hcyl is the hollow cylinder, magenta_stained_glass is the block, and 9.5 is the radius of the cylinder. example image
You can also use the previous command mentioned, //stack, to make cuboid, and other section repeating shapes efficiently.
To select the block you wish to use: these can be found by typing the block name in and then you can press tab or scroll over the option you wish to pick and left click on the block name in chat then it will automatically fill in the correct block ID into your command line.
You may also use legacy minecraft IDs which instead of purple_stained_glass, look like this: 95:10, these can be found on lists online.
It's also possible to use a blend of blocks by adding a comma inbetween a second block ID like so: purple_stained_glass,magenta_stained_glass
image
Select position 1 and 2, then this will create a line inbetween those positions.
Deform can be used to enlarge or shrink a selection depending on which character you input the command with, for example, using an asterisk "*" will shrink, while using forward slash "/" will enlarge. //deform x/=3;y/=3;z/=3, the number used means how much each face of the block will get changed by. It is highly recommended that you use scales of 3 and 9 as they can easily be divided into each other and fits nicely when adding details later on, however using scales of 2, 4, 8 can also be beneficial if you wish to have a build line up with chunks which are 16x16.
Block angles also transfer with scale.
This will flip your selection in the given direction you're facing, like a mirror.
Fills all blocks within a given radius. An example: //fill purple_stained_glass 30
replaces all blocks within your selection with another set of blocks, exmaple: //replace stone_bricks stone_brick_slab[type=double], this can be useful for shipbuilding when making non-pilotable blocks pilotable.
deletes all blocks within a selection, some alternatives are that you can also do things like //stack while selecting air behind your selection, or //replace air.
Sets all blocks within a selection to the blocks of your choice.
Downloads the selection and provides a link so you can save the schematica file on your pc, the website it links you to can also be used vice versa to paste schematica files into minecraft.
Places a block at the under section of your player model at the given height input. //up 60, //up 1
Reverses the previous command you inputted. Can be repeated multiple times but often W/E has a limit of uses for this function.
Reverses the previous //undo command. Can be repeated multiple times but often W/E has a limit of uses for this function.