Transferring player built structures to another Alpha

[JeneralJ]

My wife and I spent hours building a massive cathedral base (est about 9000 blocks) and with alpha 20 approaching we’re afraid we’re going to lose it. Is there any way to save player built structures so that they can be generated in the next alpha after we have lost access to them?

[Jugginator]

12 minutes ago, JeneralJ said:

My wife and I spent hours building a massive cathedral base (est about 9000 blocks) and with alpha 20 approaching we’re afraid we’re going to lose it. Is there any way to save player built structures so that they can be generated in the next alpha after we have lost access to them?

Honestly I wouldn't stress about it. You can always just save your game folder somewhere else and keep that, but you can also export the base then bring that over to A20 and fix up issues in the prefab editor. Go into the game, enable dm in the console, use the Z-block (press z) and use shift+g and drag the arrows to cover the whole bast in the box. Press Escape, click export prefab, give it a name then go to %appdata%/7daystodie/localprefabs and it'll be in there (4 files). Put those directly into the Prefabs folder in the main directory.

[doughphunghus]

Edit: ha! I was posting right as @Jugginatorposted. So…. Do what he said
 

This YouTube series may help. The specific link I’m posting is placing POIs into an active game, but you might want to first export/save your POI and make a backup of the files. Then wait until a20 comes out and see if you need to run some sort of special tool or do some process on the POI in case a20 messes with the block types (if blocks your POi is using are changed)

 

 

Edited August 10, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[Tatito_5158]

Unfortunately, in alpha 20 the prefab thing has been completely redone and this no longer works, I am also currently trying to place our old prefabs into alpha 20, and they simply don't, while tinkering and changing some codes around I somehow got one to spawn in 20% of the way, but don't remember what I did well enough to recreate it. Working on it though, will post back when I find a way to do it!

[Tatito_5158]

4 hours ago, Tatito_5158 said:

Unfortunately, in alpha 20 the prefab thing has been completely redone and this no longer works, I am also currently trying to place our old prefabs into alpha 20, and they simply don't, while tinkering and changing some codes around I somehow got one to spawn in 20% of the way, but don't remember what I did well enough to recreate it. Working on it though, will post back when I find a way to do it!

Aha, I finally figured out what I did right and what I did wrong, so accidently wrote some bad code, and the game while loading the server just kinda deleted part of it and made it new (kinda like steam validating files), anyways, this caused it to also overwrite the save file, and unknowingly forced the game reload a percentage of the chunk in the region, which is what actually loaded in my prefab, although only 20% of it.

Anyways, what you have to do, is somehow force the game to update the chunks and or region where you want your prefab to be placed, and it fully updates that region then your prefab gets placed into the world completely. There's a few ways to do it, but a very simple one which worked for me was to simply delete the region, and let the game regenerate it with the prefab loaded in. You wanna know your region first though, to do this you go in world (or in server) to where you want to place the prefab, then press "F3" then click the "CH" to get know the region you are in, then go to your "save file" NOT the "generated world" one and delete that specific region. Provided you have your prefab situation figured out, deleting this region from the save file and having the generated world file with the prefab will cause the prefab to be generated into the save file. and Bam, you can basically copy paste from one world to another. So all in all you're gonna wanna do a bit a both, the tutorial in the comments above, plus a the few extra steps I did. Here's a link explaining the region updating better: 

 

Edited February 14, 2022 by Tatito_5158 (see edit history)