Upgrade building tiles without deconstructing

I think it's very important to get this into the game as soon as possible. I'll try my best to explain my reasoning.

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1. Building in the early game is essentially a trap

If you build a nice estate in the early game you are basically shooting yourself in the foot, seeing as there is no actual way to upgrade the tiles. The current process is to build temporary structures (to ensure building stability), demolish what you want to upgrade, place the new upgraded tile and then demolish the temporary structure. Repeat for each structure you want upgraded. This is incredibly tedious and very unfun, and most importantly it punishes you for building a nice estate in the early game, seeing as you will eventually want to upgrade things, even if only for the different looks.

2. Creativity (therefore community engagement) is not encouraged

Upgrading isn't just about stats bonuses, it's also about the looks. Actually, it's mostly about the looks which are very important for Nightingale, since the theme / aspect of the game is a big selling point. This is why it's a very bad idea to make building gorgeous manners harder. Communities can thrive just by sharing builds (ex: look at No Man's Sky subreddit), which then leads to more engagement and more players. Right now, unless you are very motivated to build a very nice manor, once you see that upgrading is very hard/tedious, you will just give up and eternally live in a crude wood house. That, or you will build another from scratch, however most (casual) players probably won't be willing to just build another manor, as that one also can't be upgraded. You just get stuck in this loop where you have ideas, but if you actually build them, you essentially just create more work for yourself once you will have to upgrade things.

Most players do not want to wait for the very late game to build their dream manor.

3. It makes the game even harder to get into (for everybody)

Nightingale is a very complex game, and I'm sure everybody will agree. It's also not exactly easy to get into, and that's even worse if we take into account that it has very high required specs, which just limits the potential audience even more. Where I'm getting at, is that it's very important to not make it even harder to get into the game. Crafting is already very complicated, so building at least should be slightly easier/relaxing. The current way to upgrade will put off a lot of players, and this includes both newcomers to the genre and experienced Open World Survival Craft players (me included actually), who will expect a proper way to upgrade buildings, like the games they are familiar with.

5. It shouldn't be that hard to implement

Now, I'm not a game developer and I certainly don't have access to the code of Nightingale, but as far as I can tell, this is not that hard to implement into the game. I don't have the knowledge to explain it very in-depth, but here's how I would do it:

• Hammer now has additional function to upgrade

• Players can equip the Hammer and hold R to select the tier (material) they want to upgrade a tile to

• When left-clicking a full health tile, the game will try to withdraw the materials for upgrading from player storage and containers that have build enabled

• If there are enough materials, and the structure they are trying to upgrade has a counterpart for the desired tier (ex: all tiers/materials have a foundation), then the materials are withdrawn and the structure is replaced with the upgraded one

• No materials refunded for upgrading buildings like this (So, unlike manually destroying it, you don't get the materials you used to build the original tile with. I think this implementation is fine because by the point you can upgrade your entire manor, you probably don't really *need* the materials back, and also it rewards hardcore players that want to manually upgrade)

Note: This system could also then be expanded with something like multi-upgrade (select multiple structure, then try to upgrade them all at once) and probably in many other ways

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I hope I was able to make sense and that the developers will get this into the game as soon as possible. This, for me, would be priority 1, where prio 0 would be optimizing the game. There are many improvements that can be done to Nightingale, but this one I think hits the sweet spot of very frustrating for the player and also quite easy to implement, so a low risk with a high reward.


(In case anyone is wondering, this was actually written by me, by hand, not by AI. Thanks for reading!)

I think it's one of the most important things in game constructions. Another thing that helps a lot is the grid system. A game that didn't have this and was later implemented was Once Human. Just like Nightingale, the devs have a feedback channel where a lot of people asked for this QOL.

PLS add this. Without it, the Game has no FUN for Me...

It'd save us time moving stuff off a spot to deconstruct, collect the materials, then construct the new piece. This would be handy for upgrading the various crafting benches as well.

If no upgrade in place, then perhaps a Scaffolding piece that is easy to select due to handles sticking out. I have used some archways in the past, but they end up buried in the wall and are difficult to select and remove afterwards.

Would absolutely love this. Conan Exiles has had it for ages and I wouldn't know what to do without it.

I was going to post the same thing! This would be a huge QOL upgrade when building!

Also, I don't know if I'm missing something, but a way to delete tiles would be nice. It seems right now that the only way to do that is to destroy tiles with a tool.

Absolutely, it would make it far easier, especially when deconstructing things can sometimes destroy other placeables, which is a pain when you are trying to keep things as aesthetic as possible.