User blog:Mrob27/Signs in a Signless Game

In Minecraft, signs are a common way to mark areas of a world to help the player remember where things are and which way to go. In lunacraft there are no sign objects, so a bit more creativity is needed.

Circumstantial Evidence
One often finds piles of Disks where Astronauts have been killed (usually by one another). Similarly, Biogel shows where "small green" Mobs have died.



Many astronauts died here

Disks, biogel, and other droppable objects can be picked up and dropped elsewhere, thus serving as a crude type of "sign", or you can leave them where you found them which can often help in recognizing a location you've seen before.

Paths
While not exactly "signs", it is common to leave a trail of blocks or Mini Lights while walking long distances. One might also make a hole every now and then, or dig a continuous trench. Any of these methods leaves a "path" that can help you find your way from one point to another.



''A row of Light blocks forms an east-west path. Polymer blocks lead to another location in the distance, while buried Dark Stone blocks mark another trail leading towards the camera.''



The Dark Stone path winds through Plants and up a hill.

Huge Pixel Art
Making big things (such as 8-bit video game characters) out of blocks is a common art in Minecraft. They aren't really "signs" as such, but they can serve a similar purpose:



''A large Disk made of various-colored materials stands in front of a pit where I dump my disks. The smaller disk in the foreground is a signpost pointing the way to the larger one.''

Color Guide for Pixel Art
In most cases a material shown in the "Secondary" column can be made in the Assembler if you combine the two adjacent items in the "Primary" column. For example, Rock plus Moon Bark makes Dark Stone.

''§ Materials marked with this symbol are available through the "alchemy" effect of Brown_Mob explosions. See that article for details.''

* Materials marked with this symbol are given to the player in Creative Mode, but otherwise unavailable.

Big Letters
The most obvious approach is to just make really big letters out of blocks. Here is an example:



A large and fairly pointless sign

These photos show the same scene with two different settings of the visibility distance (and both have fog turned off). The sign has been constructed on a Renderblock boundary, so the letters can appear silhouetted against the sky.

(In this particular case the sign is fairly pointless, as the direction east is easy to determine by looking at the sky: the sun, Neptune and the stars all rise in the east.)

I used a font that I created back in the 1980's for putting lots of text in a small area on low-resolution screens:



My smallest pixel font, in actual size and enlarged

You can make letters a little bit shorter than this, but I like the 6-pixel-high letters because both upper and lower case can look pretty good.

Colors as Symbols
A common technique is to use different types of material to symbolize things based on ideas associated with the type of material or with the color(s). For example, one might use one's favorite color to represent the home base, or Gold to symbolize a valuable area.

Combinations of multiple colors are particularly useful because they offer many possibilities. For example, orange and black together might represent Halloween, and this could be used to symbolize the letter H or the number 10 (because October is the 10th month).

Number Color Code
For numbers there is a standard color code using 10 colors that is most often used in electronics. The code is:

When you have a choice, you might prefer to use the less common, more distinctive materials. Another material such as Ice can be used to make it clear where the number starts and ends. Here are two examples:



In an astronaut test chamber from my wrangling article, vertical layers are labeled starting from the bottom: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.



The number 1234 on the wall of a tunnel

Morse Code
Another option that is more compact than the big letters and does not require rare materials is to use international Morse code.



This sign says "MOONCRAFT" using Sand for mark and Dirt for space.

If you get used to reading signs in code, the spaces between letters can be left out making the sign half as high.