Schematic Meta-Blocks

About

This mod was designed while putting together the Ruin generation for the mod SteamNSteel. While prototyping using Schematics to design our ruins, we discovered a difficulty in managing what blocks of air should be replaced by air, and what parts should not be touched at all.

Schematic Meta-Blocks provides a series of blocks designed to differentiate between the "Interior air" of a schematic versus the "Exterior air".

It works together with Lunatrius' Schematica to provide the schematic saving.

Prerequisites

Meta-Blocks requires Schematica which in turn relies on LunatriusCore. You will need all three of these mods together in order to use it's functionality.

Usage

To use MetaBlocks, follow the following procedure:

• Design the feature you wish to capture in a schematic.
• Walk through your feature, plugging any holes that divide the interior and exterior with "Explicit Air" blocks. These blocks will be considered "Interior, so they will probably go on the inside of your feature.
• Double check that you haven't left any holes in your design.
• Place an "Interior Air Marker" down on the interior of your design.
• This will fill the area with a red grid, up until the chunk boundary.
• If it floods outside of your design and into the chunk, you have a hole somewhere. You will need to plug it and wait for it to recalculate
• Please be patient with this. It may take a while.
• Move to the chunk where there is no red lines and place down another "Interior Air Marker"
• Repeat until you have marked all of the chunks.
• Double check any nooks and crannies, such as behind pillars or furniture for unexpected exterior air.
• Proceed to save the schematic using Schematica.

At this point you should have a schematic captured named something along the lines of ./schematics/<schematicName>.schematic

You will need a schematic loader that can differentiate between interior and exterior air. For details on this or how to write your own, details will be provided in the "How to load a schematic" section.

For more details on how to use this mod, please refer to the following YouTube video.

Known Issues

Under some rare circumstances it may appear to take too long to recalculate the interior air after it has flooded a chunk. While it will usually correct itself within a minute of you plugging the whole, sometimes it feels like it's taking long enough to restart. Simply logging in and out may not suffice, you might need to close Minecraft and reload it.

Missing texture on the creative Tab. I haven't yet given myself the time to come up with a good icon/logo for MetaBlocks. I'm happy to take suggestions.

Loading a schematic

An example all-in-one class that can load schematics inside of a mod is provided at the MetaBlocks source code repository.

SchematicLoader

This file is a modified version of Schematica's loader and is MIT licensed, the file also has no dependencies not found in Minecraft Forge already. Please remember to bring the loader internal to your mod and rename the package in order to avoid collisions.

Issues and Source Code

For any issues, please refer to the project's GitHub page: SchematicMetaBlocks

License

This mod is licensed as LGPLv3, with the exception of the SchematicLoader class, which is MIT licensed.

Modpack Permissions

Uhh, sure. I have no problems with people including this in modpacks, but I don't think it would be appropriate for it unless you're planning on making schematics on a team server with lots of people building together.