As you may have noticed, the aliens of Planet XMH like their hexagons and 30° wall angles. Here are some samples of their architecture. In some cases, I’ve placed a pedestal or similar object at the room’s focal point. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a pedestal or even an item – in one case the room was inspired by one where a character was living, hanging out, doing business, whatever. In such a case, obviously I would yank the pedestal and replace it with said character’s spawn point.
After that I did some pirate construction. The aliens may have been there first, but the pirates are there now, and they’ve been up to all kinds of things and making all kinds of renovations.
19 February: Hex Room
This is just a basic hexagonal alien room. It has a long diameter of 10m, 5m ceilings, and sloped walls.
I removed the ceiling and some of the walls for the example rooms below. It was a lot easier to get a good shot using a cutaway than try to maneuver Blender’s camera inside the rooms.
20 February: Item Rooms
A lot of vidgames put their important items in special rooms.
The first is a room intended for exactly that purpose. It has a fancy pedestal in the center to old the item and six spotlight units in the corners, all shining on the item.
The second has one locked door, a large dais, and a pedestal with the item in question.
Room #3 exists to house a hermit or similar character, or perhaps something else they need to interact with on a peaceful level. The two lights illuminate the room and draw the player’s attention to the hermit or whatever. If I wanted to I could probably add an invisible turret to each light and make it fire on anyone attacking the hermit.
Our final room is much smaller than the others, with a “conversation pit” dent at the center of the floor and similar pseudo-domed ceiling. I plan to use this room for something small and relatively unimportant like an ammo stockpile, recharging station, data terminal, etc., rather than a major quest item.
21 February: Walkway Rooms
A few rooms defined largely by the narrow walkways between flooded sections. If the liquid is impassable, the flooded sections are barriers to movement but nothing else, so they could be exercises in movement-restricted ranged combat. If the player can traverse the liquid but the liquid slows them down it’s an entirely different movement restriction. Either one changes the basic conditions, and that’s never a Bad Thing. And if the liquid is impassable and completely blocks passage across the room, you can take an idea from Zelda and add some way to cross them and allow sudden access to the rest of the area.
I made two versions, one fancier than the other.
22 February: Standard 6-Meter Alliance Shipping Container
The Alliance uses standardized shipping containers. This has been largely adopted by most neighboring states as well to simplify cargo operations, including transport design. Pictured is the 6m shipping container. It is 6m long, 2.45m wide, and 2.6m tall. The 12m container is identical, except for being twice as long. There are also 1 meter cubes for handling smaller cargoes, usually luxury goods.
While the standard container is a simple box of high-strength composites with two doors on one end, there are a wide variety of variants. Some are fairly simple, like having doors on both ends or in one or both sides like a rail car. Others are refrigerated (either to 2°C for basic refrigeration, -18°C for industrial food-grade freezers, near absolute zero for cryogenic storage, or any other temperature the customer specifies), have additional reinforcement and/or padding for delicate cargoes, nearly limitless variations of internal racking and attachment points, or anything else a customer can think of.
Their availability and durability have made them popular in non-commercial applications as well. In many parts of the Alliance, they are used as the shell for prefabricated housing. Because they’re purpose-built for transportation as cargo, there is an entire loose subculture of travelers who move around the Alliance and beyond booking passage aboard cargo ships and using their homes as staterooms during transit – all they have to do is negotiate an electrical hookup with the ship’s crew, which is already a standard part of shipping plenty of other containers.
1-meter containers are treated as near-disposable by most shipping firms, and they are repurposed (in one piece or cut up into sheets) for anything people can think of across the Alliance. This is especially true on frontier worlds where high-grade plastics may not be especially common otherwise.
23 February: Pirate Barricades
While the pirates have driven off the original sapient inhabitants, the local wildlife is another story entirely. If anything, the disappearance of the aliens has allowed the other animals to thrive in their absence.
That’s fine when it’s plants and fungus, or the local equivalent of a rat or deer. When it’s how the alien ecosystem says “mountain lion,” it’s a whole different story.
There are parts of the old alien city and cave network the pirates still need to get into to look for loot and they’ve decided to establish a long-term presence there necessitating expansion, so they can’t just wall their entire base off from the rest of the world. Keeping dangerous or annoying critters out of their facilities uses a multi-pronged approach. Stout doors keep them from getting in too deep. Outside the doors they use robot turrets and electrified fences to discourage trespassers. Between the doors and fences, they maintain a system of barricades in case a pack of dangerous animals make it past the fences and it looks like the turrets might not be up to the job. In case of such an incursion, the pirates setting up behind their barricades with weapons designed to take down armored troops can usually drive them off pretty quickly.
I made the basic version and one with a row of spikes across the top to help keep predators at arm’s length.
24 February: Industrial Scaffolding Components
Because most of their facilities are underground and largely protected from the environment, the pirates can get away with a lot of open structures. Instead of nailing up walls, they just build a frame, add floors and railings, and go about their business. The frameworks are made of rigid 75mm composite pipe, the same stuff they use for shipping containers. It’s solid enough to bear a heavy load and take some punishment, and just flexible enough to bend slightly instead of snapping under a transverse load.
This tower is one of their more standard modular units. It uses four 8-meter uprights, eight six-meter horizontals, and two eight-meter square decks. They use scaffolds like this for a variety of purposes, including access to high points on a starship hull, reaching something high up on a cave wall, or examining a tall piece of equipment.
25 February: Rock and Pipe Platform
Sometimes the pirates have to bridge gaps in the caves with whatever materials they have handy. Pipes and metal decking are perennial favorites because they always have them on hand or can fabricate them readily; both are standard parts for their starship maintenance duties.
Inspired by a classic video game from the ‘80s.
