Getting Creative with Faction 12

The Bees (faction 12) are one of my favorites. They not only have my favorite weapon, but they can also be used to create your own environments – without any modding at all.

This:

Can Become:

Or This:

 

To make all this happen all you need to do is have a building design in your inventory.

A building design will work correctly if:

1. Needs at least one root block on the bottom. This can be either the light, or heavy root block.
2. Must use the building Command Module. Putting a root block on a regular ship module will cause problems, and you may not get any buildings at all.

With the building plan in your inventory, you can just wander into an unexplored region where your faction resides. Or you can refresh the world to repopulate everything.

Ideally you should have at least one building plan with a factory, otherwise you’ll still see a lot of the original ‘aircraft carrier’ designs.

Things to Note

If you make the design too big, the game will not spawn it because there won’t be enough space. Allies may spawn it as a base though.

You can add as many weapons as you want. The only cap are the normal 8000P and block limits. So you CAN make a forest of towers decked-out in weapons.

If you do not have a design for a base, a building design will usually get chosen instead.

You can NOT produce a building from your factory. Buildings get spawned as the game generates a region. If you try to build one, you’ll just get a Command Module that doesn’t grow into anything.

If you put a thruster on a building design, it just becomes a ship. It is no longer a building even if it has root blocks.

If you try to make a building with the normal ship Command Module, it may cause problems with your saved game. When I was testing, I had to delete a save because buildings would not spawn any more.

You can also change the default buildings for faction 12 by replacing the default ships. See this article.

And there you go. Get creative with it.