For those of you who are interested in playing with/changing integrity values

[YamiHikari]

After asking in a private chat, I have been told that there is a way for us to manually reconfigure integrity values. Depending on how you set up the values, you could even remove any effects they have from your game (should you want to play without them for the time being).

My recommendation is that you use this opportunity to try out a bunch of different value combinations and see what works best to allow freedom in building, while still discouraging spaghetti. The devs made this option available to us so they could get more people trying out more value combinations in a shorter amount of time than they could on their own.

Here is how you do it:
Within the "Starmade" folder, you will find a folder labeled "data." Enter that folder and open the folder within it, labeled "config." The third item down in that folder (when organized alphabetically) is the "blockBehaviorConfig.xml" file. Open this. This is a text file containing a lot of settings involving both new and old power blocks. Ignore all of that and go to Lines 296-303. These lines of code are what determines the integrity values for each possible number of touching faces in a block. These lines of code apply to ALL BLOCKS. The top line of code is the integrity value each group of blocks starts with (200). The following lines are for the values corresponding to each number of touching faces, going from least to most faces touching (-10, -8.5, -7, -4, -2, 0.5, 2). Changing these values will change the amount of integrity each block in a group contributes/removes.

After changing these configurations, if you are already in-game, you only need to press F1 (fn+F1 if on Mac) to reload the configurations into the game.

Hope this helps! Have fun!

 

[NTIMESc]

It is of course easier and faster to just edit the master file in the data directory, especially if you're not familiar with .xml files, but if you want to better keep track of your changes you can also use the built-in customization system:

In the main StarMade directory there is a folder named "customBlockBehaviorConfig".
This folder contains a HOWTO and a template example file for customizing block behavior. As briefly detailed in the HOWTO file:

1. Rename the "customBlockBehaviorConfigTemplate.xml" to "customBlockBehaviorConfig.xml".
2. Copy just the parts of the "data/blockBehaviorConfig.xml" you're interested in into the "customBlockBehaviorConfig.xml".
3. Your custom file will be merged, overriding the default values.

Using this system and only putting the items you've changed in the custom file, it's easy to see which changes you've made, or even keep multiple custom files, swapping them out to change setups. You can just delete everything in the "customBlockBehavior.xml" and paste in these integrity basics to start with:

<BlockBehavior>
    <General>
        <BasicValues>
            <CollectionIntegrityStartValue>200</CollectionIntegrityStartValue>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching0>-10</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching0>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching1>-8.5</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching1>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching2>-7</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching2>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching3>-4</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching3>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching4>-2</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching4>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching5>0.5</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching5>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching6>2</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching6>
        </BasicValues>
    </General>
</BlockBehavior>

 

[YamiHikari]

Thanks for the added information, NTIMESc. I didn't even know that was possible.

 

[Donoterase]

Yup. Saw them while I was looking for something else. I've been toying with different values. The only thing I would REALLY like to change is how they do thruster integrity--I don't see any way to change that.

 

[Benevolent27]

It is of course easier and faster to just edit the master file in the data directory, especially if you're not familiar with .xml files, but if you want to better keep track of your changes you can also use the built-in customization system:

In the main StarMade directory there is a folder named "customBlockBehaviorConfig".
This folder contains a HOWTO and a template example file for customizing block behavior. As briefly detailed in the HOWTO file:

1. Rename the "customBlockBehaviorConfigTemplate.xml" to "customBlockBehaviorConfig.xml".
2. Copy just the parts of the "data/blockBehaviorConfig.xml" you're interested in into the "customBlockBehaviorConfig.xml".
3. Your custom file will be merged, overriding the default values.

Using this system and only putting the items you've changed in the custom file, it's easy to see which changes you've made, or even keep multiple custom files, swapping them out to change setups. You can just delete everything in the "customBlockBehavior.xml" and paste in these integrity basics to start with:

<BlockBehavior>
    <General>
        <BasicValues>
            <CollectionIntegrityStartValue>200</CollectionIntegrityStartValue>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching0>-10</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching0>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching1>-8.5</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching1>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching2>-7</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching2>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching3>-4</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching3>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching4>-2</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching4>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching5>0.5</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching5>
            <CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching6>2</CollectionIntegrityBaseTouching6>
        </BasicValues>
    </General>
</BlockBehavior>

Though the true purpose of this is to allow the game to be updated without your changes being overwritten, since any config files in the /data/config/ folder are replaced whenever the game is updated.

It bears noting that IF your custom config has sections that are structurally DIFFERENT than new configs (after an update), these will be seen as invalid entries, which will cause crash loops when your game attempts to use the custom configs. This is especially true for the custom block config (not to be confused with the custom block behavior config, which is being referenced here).