Welcome to FortressCraft Evolved

Creative Mode

Welcome to our Creative Mode! Controls are below, tool guides follow on next pages.

How to play Survival Mode

Creative build tools

In FortressCraft Evolved, you have several powerful tools for creative building. Below we briefly describe each tool and will in future contain a link to the specific guide for using that tool.

Build Gun

When using the build gun (select by pressing 'X'), the Left mouse button builds the selected block and the Right mouse button deletes. You have a long build reach, so you can build blocks up to 64 meters away.

Super Dig

Holding CTRL while digging activates Super Dig mode. This will greatly speed up the dig speed, which is good for quickly clearing out spaces. Take care where you aim though, it's very easy to accidentally dig up your own work.

Build-to-Me

Holding CTRL while building triggers Build-to-Me. The selected block will be built from the highlighted face back towards your position in a straight line.

The Workshop

The Workshop is the most powerful creative tool in your FortressCraft Evolved arsenal for building detailed creations. Using it you can design your own blocks by building large scale designs which shrink down to the size of a block.

Workshops can be built anywhere in the world. To make one, you start by opening the Block Select Panel ('press '=') and selecting the Workshop Placement block:

Then you pick a place to build the workshop. In order to define a workshop you only need to place 2 (two) Workshop placement blocks. You place them so that they're in opposing corners on the floor of where you want the workshop to be. To put that in simple instructions:

1. Choose a flat area. Place down the first Workshop Placement block.

2. From there, go diagonally in any direction while staying on the same level.

3. Place the second block where you want to other corner of your workshop to be.

4. If the two blocks are on a diagonal and within 7 blocks of each other, a workshop will be created using Reinforced Rock and Reinforced Wood

Workshops can be created in sizes ranging from 2x2 (two blocks directly diagonal) to 8x8 (6 empty blocks between the first and second block).

Creating a detail block design in the workshop

Once you have built your first workshop, enter it to start creating your first detail block design. When you are in the workshop, two things happen: The outline of the workshop glows with sparkly particles, and the workshop overlay appears.

Workshop Overlay

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There are some keys that are used for selecting functions in the workshop:

Y: Start New Design

U: Use Current (not yet implemented)

I: Show Detail Window

O: Show Behaviour Window (currently turned off)

[: Previous Design

]: Next Design

When you enter a new workshop, a new design is automatically started, so pressing 'Y' will only do something once you've created your first design.

To design your first detail block, simply start building in the highlighted workshop area. The wall made from Reinforced Wood will be the front of your block. You can use any block you want to construct your design, but any blocks that have models will not show up in the detail block. Painted blocks will remain painted.

Once you're happy with your design, simply exiting the workshop will save it and create the detail block to build with. To select it, open up your Block Select screen ('=') and select your new design to a hotbar slot. You can quickly find all detail block designs by filtering for 'detail block' in the filter list. You can now start a new design in the workshop by pressing 'Y', or by building a new workshop. You can have up to 16384 detail block designs in one world!

Placing detail blocks

To place a detail block, build it like you would any other block. The design will attach to the face you have selected, and be rotated to face towards you. This allows you to place detail blocks in any orientation you want.

Detail Block example

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If you use thousands of detail blocks in the same area, you will notice significant performance drops. This is because all those details have to be rendered by your graphics card. To alleviate this, use detail blocks of lower resolutions and use normal blocks where ever you can.

Super Build

Pressing F8 will open the Super Build panel on the right side of your screen

Super Build panel

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This allows you to quickly build simple geometric shapes using any block you have selected. To use the Super Build, first select a shape to build using F9. With F10 you can select if it should build a solid or hollow shape. With F11 you toggle the build mode. Instant will get you the fastest result, but can result in some holes for very large shapes. End toggles between the anchor of the shape being centered or on the bottom middle of the shape.

X, Y and Z allow you to change the size of the shape. Pressing them increases that dimension by 1. Hold shift and press X, Y or Z to decrease by one. You can additionally hold ALT to change the size by 16 at a time.

Once you've chosen a shape, size and location, press Ins to build the shape, or Del to dig it out. You will then have to reselect a shape to dig or build again.

Copy Paste

The Copy Paste tool allows you to quickly copy part of a design you've made, rotate or flip it around, and paste it back into the world in whatever place you want. Open the copy paste panel by pressing F11.

The Copy Paste panel is currently UNDER CONSTRUCTION, which is why it doesn't look like the rest of the interface.

Copy Paste Controls

Press Ins to place the first corner of the rectangular part you want to copy.

Press Del to place the second corner of the rectangular part you want to copy. The area to be copied will now be highlighted.

Once an area has been selected, you can press End to grab it. At this point, a preview of the copied area will be shown on top of your block selection.

With an area grabbed, there are three things you can do to alter the way the area is pasted: Rotate with R, move anchor point with Shift, flip with CTRL.

'R' will rotate the grabbed area 90 degrees clockwise.

pressing Shift once will allow you to alter the anchor point with the X, Y and Z keys. Pressing SHIFT + X, Y or Z will decrease anchor position

pressing CTRL once will allow you to flip the design with the X, Y and Z keys. Each button will flip the design along that axis.

And finally, pressing Home will paste the area in the selected position.

Storing Copy Paste Schematics

It is also possible to store schematics for later use using the '<' key, and loading them using '?'. You can exchange the saved schematics with other people. But this feature is still in development so we can not give you guarantees that it will work.

Paint Gun

You can select the Paint Gun by pressing 'N'. It allows you to paint certain materials that are paintable, in any color you want. With the Paint Gun selected, LMB paints the targetted block, RMB opens the color selection window, and MMB samples the color from the selected block, if the selected block can be painted. The paint gun will display what color is selected on the gun itself.

Paint Gun window

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Finding Paintable Materials

Only certain blocks can be painted. To quickly find which ones, open the Block Select screen ('=') and check the 'Paintable' filter. All of the blocks displayed there can be placed in the world and painted.

Weather Staff

The weather staff allows you to control the weather, the time of day, and to throw meteors around. Select it using 'C'. When you enter your world, one of the statistics it shows is total amount of meteors people have thrown around in FortressCraft Evolved.

Weather Staff modes

eSun: Makes the current rain or snow stop and makes the sun shine (or the moon, if it is night

eLightning: Creates a heavy storm. LMB triggers lightning

eSnow: Creates snowfall

eRain: Creates rain

eDayNight: Cycles the time forwards or backwards quickly

eMeteor: Summons meteors. LMB summons a meteor from high in the sky to strike somewhere near you. RMB summons a meteor from the weather staff aimed at the selected block. There is a short cooldown on both of these actions, so spam clicking may not summon as many meteors as you'd like :) When slinging meteors, watch out for orbital space stations!

Welcome to FortressCraft Evolved

Survival Mode

You have just escaped the Orbital Station on a damaged escape shuttle. It didn't survive re-entry, but luckily you managed to eject safely. Now you will have to survive on this dreadful alien planet!

Starting Out

Your state-of-the-art suit can keep you safe under these cold conditions, but it requires power to do so. The ship's crash site may give you the resources to see you over on the short term, so you should head out there as soon as you can.

Controls

The game controls are listed in a separate guide linked below.

Controls

Survival Tips

For those who don't want to read a whole guide, these are some quick gameplay tips. The following pages go into more detail on how to start out.

- During the day, your suit is designed to power its battery with sunlight.

- Your starting area has a Central Power Hub, use it to turn harvested resources into power to charge adjacent machinery.

- You can top off your power suit from the Central Power Hub or pressing 'Q' on the Power Storage Block.

- Interact (‘E’) with the Manufacturing plant to see what you can make.

- Craft torches to heat yourself using the Self Crafting window (‘C’).

- Use the scanning tool ('M') to Scan blocks and process them at the Research Station for new recipes.

- The scanning tool can also do environment scans like the Unknown Material ping to find new ores.

- Pay close attention to the battery discharge rate on your suit, a blue text indicates that extreme cold is affecting your suit and a red text indicates extreme heat.

- The headlamp uses power. It’s great for exploring but don’t leave it on!

- Coal is the best fuel for starting out, but if you're in a pinch you can burn the local flora.

- You may have to dig very deep to find the ores you're looking for.

- You have a large build reach, so use it to place torches across large caverns.

Crash site equipment

The Central Power Hub is your first power generator. It has solar panels, and can burn fuels to generate power. It can only hold one fuel item at a time, so automating the delivery of fuel materials is essential. It has a large internal power storage capacity.

Central Power Hub

The Power Storage Block can store 250 power and distribute it to adjacent machines.

PowerStorageBlock

In order to acquire bars useful for crafting new machines, you will need to process ores in the Ore Smelter. You can manually interact with it, or automate the supply of materials. It will only start smelting once it has received enough materials to smelt an ingot.

Ore Smelter

You can craft simple things yourself using the crafting window you open with 'c', but for more complex machines and components, you will have to use the Manufacturing Plant. The recipes are divided into categories which you can find by clicking on the coloured squares. At this point in time, the Plant can only use items in your inventory, and crafting things will put them directly back there.

Manufacturing Plant

When you start out, your scanner has no knowledge of any materials found on the planet. Any scans you do can be processed at the Research Station and will yield you research points. You can also undertake various research projects here, and develop new recipes for the Manufacturing Plant by spending research points. The research station requires power to operate.

Research Station

Finding your first ores

Your scanner has the capability to scan for known ore types, but to do this it must know about them first. The key to finding new ores is to use the Unknown Material ping on your scanner. If you use this at first, it will return you all the blocks around you because it doesn't know about them.

So your first task will be to scan your surroundings and process these scans at the Research Station. As soon as you've scanned all the common dirt and snow around you, the Unknown Ore ping will stat returning useful things around you.

Once you've found an ore vein near you underground, you can scan these and process them to teach them to your scanner. From that moment on, using an Ore ping with your scanner will return veins of that ore type.

Extracting ore

Now that you've found your first ore vein, you'll need to extract the ore in order to use it. You can dig it using right click, but this drops only one ore every once in a while and generates rubble for the rest.

A better option is to use your Super Dig mode, which you activate by holding CTRL while digging. This will quickly dig large amounts of ore, but will drain your power reserves at high speed.

Watch out when draining all your power on Super Digging an ore vein, your suit also requires power to keep your body warm! Try to set up a safe route back to your power generator, with torches along the way to heat you back up.

Automating Extraction

A more sustainable way of mining ore is to use the Ore Extractor. You start out with some, and you can place one down next to a vein and fill it with power to make it start digging. It has a small internal storage space, so until you can offload that somewhere else you'll have to come by once in a while to pick up the results.

An ore extractor can mine out an entire vein of ore when it touches a single ore block. Therefore you will not have to move it until the entire vein has been cleared.

Ore Extractor

Storage Hoppers will accept ores and items from machines and supply them to other machines. This makes them essential in automating any part of the mining and smelting process.

Storage Hopper

Once you have the resources to spare, Conveyors can help you automate bringing the ore from your Extractor to your Ore Smelter. They are cheap, but you will need many of them to connect your mining operations to your main base. They don't require power to operate.

Conveyor Belt