Building

CardLife lets you build structures in the world. You can craft the building pieces using the inventory crafting system for basic resources (wood and stone), and the forge for advanced resources (ingots). At the moment different materials are just cosmetic but they will provide different stats in a future update.

## Getting Started

AKA, the Basic Fundamentals of Building.

To begin, you will need to place a **foundation** piece onto the terrain before you can add any further pieces. Foundation pieces include: square foundations, double foundations, stair foundations, pillar foundations, sloped foundations, sloped fence foundations, fence foundations, triangle foundations, and corner foundations.

When holding a building piece, if you hover over a placed piece in the world, it will highlight the positions that the held piece can be connected to:

* The **G key** cycles through different positions when holding a piece (i.e. rotations etc.).
* Pressing the **Left Mouse button** will place held pieces.
* The **Delete key** deletes a placed piece.

Building pieces connect using indicator points that tell the game what pieces can connect with each other. A general rule to remember is that edges will connect to edges. This means that a sloped ceiling will connect to a sloped wall but will not connect to a square wall.

Once you've placed your foundations, you'll likely be interested in placing **walls**. Walls can be placed as-is or customized to make windows. See the Customization section below. As with all building pieces, connectors in the pieces will require you to create different walls to connect to different foundations. For instance, a corner foundation would require you to use a corner wall.

The same basic rules apply to **ceilings**- minus a few exceptions. Ceilings can't be placed unless you have at least one wall to connect it to. Ceiling pieces can also be used as floor pieces for second, or higher, floors. As with walls, the appropriate wall must be used for each ceiling piece. Be careful of pitched and sloped ceilings. *Sloped ceilings* only connect to *sloped gable walls* and *pitched ceilings* only connect to *pitched gable walls*. Both *triangle pitched ceilings* and *triangle sloped ceilings* connect to square walls.

## Customization

Building pieces are handled slightly different than tools when using the customization feature:

* You can only cut holes in the pieces, not change their outer shape. This is to make sure the pieces always connect properly.
* Holes are temporary at the moment and will eventually be filled with another material i.e. glass to ensure that the build is always structurally sound.
* Not all pieces that you can craft will be customizable with the interface such as stairs. The rule of thumb is that if there is a piece of card large enough to have a design drawn into it, it will be customizable. Stairs do not fit this description.

There are no windows in the game. This means that if you would like to create a window piece for your structure, you will need to customize a wall piece in order to out cut holes where your window would be. This is one of the many examples where customization can make even more unique building pieces than what the game provides.

## Tips & Tricks

Often times, the natural incline of the ground or placement of your foundations may not leave room for stairs. This will result in having to dig out the area to make room for the staircase, or simply missing out on a staircase. To work around this, placing a stair foundation is the best strategy, especially if you do not wish to add dirt around the base of your stairs in order to fill in the gaps.