As some of you may of noticed a giant player made TPL Logo Space Otter has appeared in the skies above Nebulor in recent weeks and it is quite the feat of engineering and design.

The otter or as it is more affectionally known Charli V2 is the work of Stars Reach player Hubert to whom I got to ask some questions about this impressive project.

What Inspired the build?

Hubert got the idea for Charli V2 having “built something similar about 5 months ago on Akacala during the Stars Reach Pre-Alpha test then.” The original idea came from a player by the name of Justa Mirage who planning to put the face of Charli the space otter from the recently released promotional art from Playable worlds on the side of a building, ultimately Justa decided not to proceed with the project so Hubert asked for his blessing to continue.

With Justa’s blessing Hubert built Charli V1 with the help of “Justa Mirage, Chayce, and Mr. Goshdarn.”

Hubert says “Originally I was planning to make Charli V2 on Baracatis III right after the wipe that took out Charli V1 and include it with the large town GUNC was building, but I shelved the plan and worked on a very large tunnel instead. I felt it was time to bring it back now though.”

It looks amazing how long did it take to make in game once the was design finalised?

It took Hubert around 6 days not including downtime “after the planet “launched” (when the world rotation was still happening)” although he says he “had prepared a few weeks before that and had designs in mind for several months.”

“The majority of the building time was involved in running missions to gather money to buy zoning lots from the govbot after donating the money (which helped level the govbot as well).”

Hubert says he primarily did missions by himself but “used whatever was available in the govbot to buy the zoning lots so thanks to all others who donated to the govbot.”

How many blocks is it made up of?

While Hubert admits he does not know the exact number of blocks used he was able to do some quick maths based on how many blocks a zoning lot can hold and estimates an impressive “between 8000 and 9000 instaformer blocks.”

Was the designed planned out on any software first?

Surprisingly the only software Hubert used to plan his design is MS paint, he did this for both Charli V1 and Charli V2.

“For V1 I copied the image of the Charli sticker from the Stars Reach Store page and cut just his face out with nothing more than MS paint. V1 started with only 4 homesteads and just included his face. Basically I cropped the face then resized the image also with MS Paint so that it pixellated to the size I would need to place them in the homesteads (21×21) and drew lines where the homestead boundaries would be.”

Due to popular demand Charli V1 was extended to a 3×4 grid using 11 homesteads instead of the original 4.

For Charli V2 Hubert used the same process except with the full Charli image this time and broke it into a 6×6 grid so he “could keep the same resolution as V1 had for the face.” This however posed further challenges as this required 36 homesteads and the max we can have per character is 3. This is where the addition of the GovBot and zoning lots to the game came in handy as they are not limited to 3, their only limits are the ability to buy them from the GovBot and cost which is significantly more than a homestead.

Hubert does say he has “a side computer running Linux that I viewed the image with Gwenview (but any image editor/viewer could be used) and used it to figure out what blocks to place.”

One of the more limiting factors for Hubert was deciding what blocks to use as “instaformer block choices are a little limited in colors [sic] currently and some blocks required materials that are not available or too difficult to obtain.” For example matching the orange spacesuit proved to be tricky so Hubert used a material that looked slightly browner instead.

Was material gathering a group effort and what material were used?

Hubert was fortunate that there had not been any character wipes recently and “a good portion of the materials” had been building up on his characters before he had started the project. However he did get donations of copper which he used for the spacesuit and gives a special mention to Chayce the mayor who gave him the rights withdrawn funds from the GovBot to buy lots.

Though it was possible to do solo Hubert says “a group effort would help speed it up immensely. The mission “grind” to get enough money for 26 lots was pretty tough to do mostly alone but add a few other players and it would help significantly. And in the future they’ll be adding maintenance on lots which will make a group effort much more useful as well.”

The materials Hubert was glad to have at his disposal were Sandstone which he used for the otters fur and Conglomerate for light parts of the otters face. He also says he found some materials by using the Chronophaser to lithify and erode materials. He found various shades of gray could be achieved with glass, marble, diorite and granite.

Any plans to remake Charli upon full game launch?

Hubert says he is not sure yet if he will remake Chali upon full game launch although has already been challenged to make a 3D version and prefers to just do projects as they come to mind. He goes onto say “Plans can change just like they did when I planned to do this back in November on Baracatis III. We shall see.”

Any tips for anyone else looking to get into large scale building projects in Stars Reach?

When asked this Hubert had the following to say:

“For a really large scale project an organized team will really be helpful. Obviously the more people working on the project the faster it will complete. But at the same time organizing a large group will be a challenge in itself. So it’ll take you longer to complete alone but you won’t have to argue with anyone about how things are done at least. Ultimately though I expect in the future we’ll see builds created by well organized groups that will be virtually impossible for solo players to create.

Stacking homesteads or zoning lots is a difficult and tricky process now. The game will eventually have snapping logic to make things easier when placing them but currently you have to place them at the center point and it has to be on a CASim object material (something you can deposit with a depositor and extract with a terraformer). So you have to build little pillars and bridges using the Depositor tool to make a place to put the homestead or it will overlap the nearby homestead and not let you place. It is somewhat of an artform. I’ve had a lot of experience with it but I still have trouble with controlling the output of the depositor from time to time.

Also, if you buy a zoning lot through the govbot and you’re not the mayor you should know that there is currently no setting/permission to allow you to pick up a zoning lot that is placed. The only person that can pick up a zoning lot is the mayor themself. For this reason I used a spare homestead that I can pick up and place several times to verify I have exactly the right place (I zoom in at the material where I’m placing and ignore the boundaries). Once I’ve determined it is the right place I can drop the lot down and significantly reduce the need to bother the mayor to pick it up for me again.”

Any other designs lined up to try?

When asked this Hubert kept his cards close to his chest saying while he has “lots of ideas but I don’t want to make them public until I’m sure they’ll actually happen.”

Finally I asked Hubert if there was anything else he wished to add:

“I’ve been playing the pre-alpha for over a year and the building options seem mostly only limited by your imagination. I like very large builds because they tend to impress in a certain way but I’ve seen a lot of small builds that seem pretty impressive too. Before Govbot you were limited in the number of homesteads you could place due to the number of characters available on your account and friends. But with zoning lots if you can pay for them you can as many as you need.

The game is currently undergoing some major changes unrelated to the building mostly but I can’t wait until they return to improving building features. Being able to create impressive structures of any kind will be a great way to pull players to specific planets when the game is live.”

Thank you to Hubert for agreeing to do a Q&A on Charli V2 you can go and see Huberts work yourself in game now by visiting the planet Nebulor, you will find Charli V2 in the sky above you as soon as you load in through the planet portal, I am sure you will find it “Otterly” amazing.

Please a gallery below of Charli V1, Huberts underground tunnel and Charli V2.