Tips and Tricks

Tips to help you get creating in a quick and fun way.

## General building tips:

**Scrounge Pile**: Once you start building, you will find that you need certain objects or shapes to construct what you want. Given the immense number of assets available in TRPGE, this can be a daunting task to try and pick through them all for that one part you know you saw before. Thus it's generally a good idea to go through the assets at the beginning of a build, pull out anything and everything that you think will come in handy, and put them off into a corner for easy access.

**Pro-Parenting**: Good use of the parenting system can help make the initial build easier as well as assist in any changes for later sessions in the same area. If you fill a mine cart with gear for a part of a map, just make that mine cart the parent of everything inside right then. Later, if you need another cart elsewhere, you can just copy that one and paste a filled cart wherever you need. Also, if the party decides to move the cart out of the way, you don't have to pull each piece out one at a time, just click the cart and drag everything off in one go. Rearranging a room you've spent time to set up but then decide isn't arranged well will be much easier if all the shelves you loaded down with nick-nacks can just be immediately shifted wholesale to the other side of the room. Also, also, if you want to reuse a room later, having all the props within prefabbed together will make it super quick to delete everything out.

**Coordinate Your Building**: The coordinates system can make several things easier. **Alignment:** Trying to line up floor tiles is much simpler if you drop the first one on an even coordinate (2/0/2 for instance) then place the next one at the next coordinate over so it aligns with the first (2/0/4, same position as the first but 2 more meters to the side to account for a 2x2 tile). **Symmetry:** If you're trying to make something perfectly symmetrical, placing the primary object at the center of the board will let you use coordinates to position other pieces exactly opposite one another. For instance, if you had a spaceship fuselage you wanted engines on either side of, you'd start by zeroing it out to 0/0/0, then you'd put the first engine exactly where you want it resized to whatever dimension you like, then copy the engine and paste it in. If the first engine was at 1/2/4 then the second would be at -1/2/4 (mirrored position side to side, same height, same position forward). **Quick Positioning:** It may feel like just dropping something in then sliding it around to a known coordinate would be fast, but it's almost always faster to punch coordinates in manually. This is especially true as assets can actually place past the displayed hundredths on the coordinate system, so if you put two things down that should be at the same horizontal position but one looks off a tiny bit, it probably actually is. Putting in the coordinates manually will set them perfectly to those positions and can correct the "off by a hair" feeling you get on some placements.

## Using The Beta Builds

Just in case, make a new campaign to play with Beta Branch features - Beta branches sometimes break.

In "**%AppData%\LocalLow\PolyDemons\The\_RPG\_Engine"**, you can go into Campaigns, open up a campaign folder with a map you want to mess around with in Beta Branch, and copy those .map files to the new Campaign you made, and they will show up.

## Backing Up your Campaigns / Maps

Just in case, make a new campaign to play with Beta Branch features - Beta branches sometimes break.

In "**%AppData%\LocalLow\PolyDemons\The\_RPG\_Engine"**, you can go into Campaigns, and make back up copies of the various Campaign Folders or map files to wherever you want them to be.

And in Templates, you can back up any characters / map templates / meshes/ prefabs / tokens you would like.