Oddscaping (Landfill-type Builds and the like)Back to top Given the diverse amounts of bricks within Blockland, certain unique bricks may come to light as novel options to create terrain with. And as builders, we cannot underestimate their potential efficacy at forming the kind of environments we want. And we cannot discount the probability of such "Terrain" appearing in real life.
Take, for example, a rubbish heap within a disjointed landfill. Waste of all kinds can be found cluttered together within the landfill, creating hills and valleys and nooks and crannies just like normal terrain does. The ideal garbage mound will contain many different kinds of commodities, ranging from forks and spoons to computer mice, CRT monitors, and flat-screen TV's. When building landfill, you should mix both props and standard bricks to create an opaque mound, as the gaps within prop bricks will otherwise make the mound seem airy and light, which it clearly cannot be.
Excellent Example Provided by Wink:
The important thing to remember, however, is that when trash is heaped up, generally you find less and less large things on the top than you'd find at the bottom. Nobody will lug a 42" plasma tv to the top of a rubbish heap unless the moving-picture screen works and he or she wants to earn some extra money broadcasting advertisements to the many tourists who visit the place. The tops are generally propogated with smaller-sized appliances and disposable items, so place forks, spoons, discarded tv-dinners, failed instant-heat products, and maybe things as large as computer monitors up there. As you move down, keep the same pattern, scattering the lightweight waste around evenly, then coming back and adding in larger pieces of trash like keyboards, file cabinets, and your potato of a computer. Near the bottom, feel free to add and arrange even larger items, such as decrepit life-size plastic jeeps that miraculously work, flat-screen TV forts, and outdated mechs made by Kaje. Also, consider scattering small caves around the build for the occasional entranced tourist who decides that this place is the place they want to live. Be nice and add in file cabinets and derelict stoves into the walls, because you can and they can't. Sometimes just putting nice appliances near each other will attract a tourist-resident, even with the significant lack of roof.
Specimen of tourist-resident trapped by the landfill-home's creator (by Wink)
Unlike other styles of terrain, you actually
want to go for a "hills on flat" style of building. This allows you to clearly define what is landfill and what is the paths that tourists can walk on and get run over by the occasional trash collecting truck passing by.
An important overall tip is
not to align the trash on a grid, like the (dumb) builder of this build did:
Gaps in the terrain are easily seen, and makes the terrain look more airy than it actually is. It also makes it difficult to define what levels of terrain are there and when one needs to climb up to the next layer or risk developing shin scrapes. In addition, the coloration of the CRT monitors don't match up to anything that would ever exist and so is dumb in its setup. There is also a distinct lack of forks and spoons.
Don't forget to add foliage; plenty of weeds, edible and unedible, appear within landfills. So does rotten foodstuffs. Leave them in unplugged, broken refrigerators with doors open to give the landfill a feel of "oh this is what happens when a hurricane hits and cuts off all power in a city where every home has a refrigerator with food inside". Combine it with
Google Nose to get the best environmental feel possible.
I strongly advise against using food bricks. Using plastic, pristine-looking food to trick residents into thinking that there is food available in these kinds of popular tourist destinations is considered cruel and unusual punishment within the states of Kentucky, Canada, and Somalia, and is sanctioned against by the WHO, IRS, and UFO.
Going a different direction, building standard terraform designs using bricks that fit well together such as 2x2x5 lattices is actually a viable idea. In this case, terraforming must be done within zone cubes as it is the only way to get certain brick-height differences with such a tall brick. It can result, however, in unique terrain that unlike normal terrain, allows people to see through it to a certain extent, giving them advance notice of enemies or traps lying behind certain terrain formations while keeping them behind an object they cannot shoot through. However, it will increase lag significantly since the octo system. It also gives the terrain a noticeably futuristic or mechanical feel, and I would advise using it in small patches within some industrial build.
