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Grid Walls and Gates

This mod adds three types of grid walls and gates to the structure tab.

Why would you want something like that? Well, they enclose rooms but let heat and light (generated light, not natural) through. So you can have, say, a dining room and a hospital in one structure sharing a light source and a heater/cooler. This is especially useful for early tiny colonies in extreme climates. Or later, when your chess table in a corner causes all your connected corridors to be classified as a rec room. (Smaller rooms, instead of a large multi-purpose one, are easier to keep clean and to floor. This impacts, for example, surgery success chance in hospitals, meal quality in the kitchen and research speed in laboratories. You can also have single bedrooms early in the game with a lower drain on resources.)

Now with support for Perspective: Doors.

Grid walls and gates in general:

• Allow heat and light (generated light, not natural) to pass through them.
  
• Do not support wall-mounted fixtures.
  
• Are paintable.

Plank grid wall and gate

• Less sturdy than their vanilla counterparts.
  
• Somewhat ugly.
  
• Can be made from: wood or stone.

Weave grid wall and gate

• Almost as sturdy as their vanilla counterparts.
  
• Can be made from: wood, stone or metal.
  
• Available after research: smithing.

Room partition and gate

• Delicate and beautiful.
  
• Skilled construction needed (10+).
  
• Works as meditation focus like a vanilla wall, but a little more effectively.
  
• Can be made from: wood, stone or metal.
  
• Available after research: smithing, machining.

Do I really need Celsius for this?
This mod works without it, but it loses a major feature. Celsius is necessary for the heat exchange to work. It is my understanding that, with vanilla temperature mechanics, room-enclosing structures will always insulate against heat.

What's the benefit?
When resources are scarce in extreme weather conditions, these walls make it easier to create separate rooms with a certain purpose (bedroom, hospital, kitchen, etc.) and heat/cool or light them with few fuel-consuming sources. Pawns are in a better mood when they have their own bedroom. Light level affects mood as well as global work speed. Cleanliness, which is improved by flooring, increases tending or cooking quality as well as research speed. You can get away with building floors in the smaller important rooms instead of having to tile a large all-purpose room. When your colony and workforce is still small, you can also concentrate cleaning efforts on those small significant areas.

Really, 100% cover from a grid?
Unfortunately, yes. There is no line of sight through a grid wall. (If an impassable object is created with less than 100% cover, it will no longer work as a room-enclosing structure. If anyone knows how to influence this with XML, please give me a hint.)

But doesn't a grid block at least a little light?
Realistically, it should. But blocking light is a yes or no property when set with XML, so it's either all or nothing. Same with shadows.

I've wanted to create room dividers for a long time, and I find them especially useful early in the game. I tried to balance this with the stats and other properties. I really wanted them to not support roofs but couldn't implement it. (The weather overlay tended to show where it wasn't supposed to.)
Without Celsius, the grid structures become more or less like vanilla walls/doors that let generated light through. Because natural light is blocked, they will not work like windows. Because line of sight is blocked, they will not work like embrasures.

I'm not an artist, but I do like how the textures turned out. If I've committed any terrible visual blunders, please point them out to me. Like I said, this is not my area of expertise.
Grid walls are linked via the linkFlag of the vanilla fence. Since fences are usually built outside and grid walls are designed to be built inside, there hopefully won't be any unwanted linkage between them.



Adding this mod to an existing save should be possible (but be careful anyway). Removing this mod from a save might work if you first deconstruct all the grid walls and gates on your map.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues or errors.


Published under:
License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)[creativecommons.org]