On Dojo Decorating and Pain

Considering the fact that Warframe is a game about space ninjas, it has a pretty damn good architectural scene. In fact, you can do a huge amount of decorating not just in your own ship but in clan dojos as well. In fact, you can spend hours simply making a clan dojo look nice. You can also spend hundreds of Platinum making your ship nice. The decorating tool in Warframe is great, but it has… problems. And lots of pain.

It IS a big improvement though.

When I last talked about decorating, we didn’t have as many decorations as we do now. We also got some additional new tools, like the ability to “contribute all” on a single decoration. You can now also “duplicate” items in a Dojo, which will spawn a copy in exactly the same position and orientation as an existing object. Frankly, the Duplicate addition has made decorating so much more fun, and I’d like to see it in Orbiter decorating as well.

There are also more items to play with, more decorations for us to use. The addition of effects has been pretty nice, and being able to change lighting colours in rooms makes for interesting effects. Sadly the lighting doesn’t blend well from room to room.

We still have problems.

That being said, there are some problems. Actually placing items can be very finicky. Every decoration has a different point of origin with which you move it around. But this means items don’t cooperate if they are too near walls and such. You can phase some items through walls and through each other, but you have to make sure their origins don’t collide. This can be very tedious.

Snapping items to a grid can also be weird as well, namely on rotated objects. Orokin pathways are still annoyingly hard to snap to a grid, but luckily the other walkways are fine.

Some items just hate being scaled up and down as well. They will constantly skip over various scalings, or reset their size. And annoyingly, some items can’t be scaled at all. Why CAN’T I make the various walkways bigger? Why can’t I make smoke or flames bigger? This doesn’t make much sense, especially when you can make things like the Tribuna, which displays text, bigger and smaller with ease.

The biggest issue by far is funding

I actually don’t have an issue with the costs to construct a decoration. Most of these things are made with common resources that don’t require too much farming. While you do lose all resources spent to the clan’s treasury, it’s all stuff like ferrite and control modules which everyone has tons of. That’s ignoring the fact clan mates can help fund as well.

But to actually spend these resources, you have to manually go to every item and fund construction of it. Fine if you’re just doing some small decorating. This is an absolute hell of a time when working with big builds. The capacity of a large room is 500-1000 decorations, and a large build will use at least 300 or so. That’s 300 items that have to individually be constructed!

We really, REALLY need a big FUND ALL button for each room, that will fund as much as possible with whatever resources are in the clan’s treasury. It would save so much time. Especially since I spent 2 hours funding construction for part of a large room earlier.

“Destroy All Decorations” and “Reset Room” buttons would be great as well. Because sometimes you need to start over.

There’s also some bugs…

Sometimes, when moving an item that has been placed, I find I can’t see the item and it doesn’t move. When I move the item again, it will teleport and be somewhere else nearby. If this happens, I tend to work around it by moving and then cancelling the movement of an item.

Another issue is that sometimes I have to exit out completely from decoration mode because it just… dies. The whole mode becomes insanely unresponsive

But also… normally my Warframe is relatively crash-free. While spending long amounts of time in my clan dojo however, I’ve had multiple crashes. One crash just sent me back to my desktop, prompting a crash report. Another crash though sent me to the hardware failure Warframe Support page. Yeah, that’s an actual page that exists, and Warframe can apparently detect when a crash triggers this. Although it can sometimes be a false positive.

I haven’t had any other issues in any other games or in Warframe in general. So it’s clearly something to do with decorating in dojos.

At least I can build even more cool things now.

On the plus side, we have been getting more gear steadily over time. Rather than just the old Tenno/Orokin/Grineer/Corpus stuff, we also have a wide array of natural items, Infested items and Sentient items too. And we also have effects like flames and lightning! Fingers crossed we get more stuff later, like Cetus-themed items and perhaps Corpus and Grineer variants.

But we are still lacking one thing: water. I’d love for some more fluid-like objects in decorating. Even if they are just puddles to splash in.