On Building and IKEAframe
IKEAframe is the joke name given to creating things inside your ship or in clan dojos in Warframe. For a game built around creepy bio-mechanical space ninjas roaming the solar system killing armies of evil clones and profit-driven madmen, there’s actually a lot of effort that has been put into making your own custom spaces.
It wasn’t until this year though that we got better decorating tools. It used to be that you could only place things while in your Warframe, being unable to move the camera any way your Warframe couldn’t. This meant that building things on top of each other or above a certain height was incredibly difficult, especially when sprinting and jumping were disabled. The current Warframe decorating tool though gives you a free camera, similar to that of Captura mode, as well as an array of abilities, like rotating along 3 axis, the scaling of certain items, a choice between free placement and surface snapping and the toggling of snapping to grids of 0.10m, 0.25m and 1m.
On top of this, a huge amount of new items have been added, giving us far more tools to build with.
While most of the decorations for your Orbiter cost platinum, there’s still some cheaper items you can get by pure luck or by buying or trading them. Ayatan Sculptures are by far the most common decoration, but you can make fish trophies by purchasing the blueprints from the fish lady in Cetus, and there are a handful of items like the Glass Fish and Inaros’s urn which you can obtain via quests or finding and scanning items. Funnily enough, Prime Time and Dev Streams, which happen every other Thursday and Friday on Twitch, will also occasionally reward you with a decoration or two for watching – a few months ago they gave away displays for your ship, as well as Stalker noggles – big headed mini statues of our angst-y sentient-powered friend.
Dojos though, they got some amazing things to build with. Originally it was all mostly a handful of Tenno-based items, states, trophies, things like that, not much you can actually build with. Now though, there’s Tenno, Grineer, Corpus AND Orokin themed items, including not just decorations, barrels, things like that, but actual architectural stuff too, like walls, walkways and pillars.
Of course, with an expansion of things to play with, everyone’s imaginations have gone wild. There’s been a phase of nice gardens, massive robots and all sorts. I’ve had a lot of fun building things in my clan dojo, and I’ve been to loads of other dojos to trade and seen some awesome stuff, like a floating garden arrangement and a massive dragon sort of thing someone had built.
On top of that, we recently got a nice lighting update too. So not only can you make your massive robot or alien monster or night club, you can also change the lighting to match. Thankfully they also added several new dojo colours (which need to be unlocked via research) so we FINALLY have black, white and a couple of greys. We’ve also got our own DIY Obstacle courses, so there’s something for everyone!
That being said, the decorating tool can be a royal pain in the ass, to the point that you will want to smash your computer in. Sometimes things simply will not go where you want them to go, especially when you’re using the grid system. In other cases, things seem to snap to each other despite the fact you’ve already turned surface snapping off, and whenever you quit and re-enter decorating mode, you get switched back to surface snapping anyway even though your grid settings remain the same. Some objects, particularly the Grineer ones, lie about how much you can scale them up and down, and occasionally break when scaling either way, turning full-sized and giving you no option but to destroy and place your item again.
Otherwise though, the whole decorating system is pretty nice. Especially the grid system. Helps make things much tidier.
The grid system is best used for walkways, because they have predetermined lengths, and they fit the 1m snapping really well. Using a 1m grid allows you to really quickly snap together walkways and place them without any hitches or overlapping, and they work whether you use surface snapping or free placement.
Except Orokin stairs. Orokin stairs are the fucking worst. They don’t snap together like every other walkway and ramp, and when you do get them to connect, they either overlap or float awkwardly with gaps. Fuck them.
Unfortunately as well, everything needs 24 hours to build, and everything needs funding with your own resources – except for obstacle courses, because waiting 24 hours to test a course would be stupid. IKEAframe is NOT for newbies, it’s for people with millions of resources, as well as huge stockpiles of things like Orokin Cells, Gallium, Polymer Bundles and Plastids. Although if you’ve got some spare alloy plates or salvage or anything like that, I’m sure people won’t mind if you contribute.
Speaking of resources, I need more Oxium. Fucking spend it all on building walkways and paths for the trading hub of the clan dojo.
