INI Tweaks
First and foremost you really want to speed up the snapping preview. To do that you need INI tweaks


[Workshop]fOutpostSnapPreviewHoldSnappedTime=-50fOutpostSnapPreviewWaitForPreviewTime=-50fOutpostSnapWaitForPostSnapCycleTime=-50

(check Tweaks in mod description for more details)

This will allow you to click through dozen snap points in 2 seconds, speeding up your building a lot. It will also help when moving around, as the object "in hand" will be snapping and resnapping in real time, following your mouse.

Starting

I would always recommend starting with either a foundation, or an airlock. That gives you 2-click positioning, so you can place the building above the rest of rocky and uneven terrain. This alone will remove 90% of "can't place" and "collision" errors.

Once you aren't tied to ground, you're free to start snapping other pieces.

If you started with airlock, next logical piece is one of the walls with small door openings, as that is only thing that will work as intended. To that wall you can snap more walls or central pieces (floor/ceiling).

If you started with foundation, depending on which one you picked, I'd recommend adding stairs (if you didn't use ones with automatic stairs). Do it with my sectional stairs, auto-stairs, or use Catwalk mod (snap platform to foundation corner then add catwalk and stairs). Once you can walk up to foundation level, pick a good place and count on space you'll need for your vision. If making hub, first building pieces should be central floors/ceilings.

There's a game bug I can't solve, which makes round floor piece drop "through" the foundation. To go around it, place an airlock without stairs from my mod (very end of Miscellaneous section) as a starting point, or place semi-circular piece insted, add few round walls, then MOVE the central piece and only after moving it delete it. Then snap full circle to the walls and continue building.

If you are building with simple metal walls, you have a piece called ORIGIN, it looks same as first in the list, but is placed last. Use it to snap to foundation, then snap another wall to it. If you don't want building at that location, just snap few walls until you reach are where you want to be. Then MOVE the closest temporary piece, and then you can remove/delete Origin piece and all the other temp pieces.

Positioning

Once you have faster snapping you can really aim at place where you want to snap. Eg build a 2-story 2x2 central piece for hubs (floor/ceiling), then pick up matching wall and aim mouse at top left corner, it will snap wall at that part of second floor. Move pointer to bottom right it will snap to right side of ground floor.Clicking through snaps

Sometimes game will not snap the way you want after mouse positioning. It's annoying. So we have to click through all the snap points to reach one we want. But that may be 100 clicks away. So, if you are aiming at correct piece, and left-click dozen times and it's still not there - stop! Right-click to go in opposite direction instead!

Hub corners

For some weird reason some hub corner pieces are moved to the side vs the mouse pointer. Mostly to the left. So when snapping those, point to the right of the place you want them to snap at, until you see them snap. Sorry! Can't find way around it.

Because of that I will usually add corners last. So in order, first build central floor/ceiling pieces, then snap all the straight walls, and finally snap corners at the end.

Moving and removing pieces

Game has a very weak foundation/grounding mechanic, andnit sometimes works sometimes is ignored. So for example if you build even vanilla containers in a stack on the ground, deleting one from the bottom of the stack will sometimes extend the upper levels foundation to ground, sometimes it will delete everything above, sometimes it will leave stuff flying.

Same happens with building. Make foundation, build on it, and if you delete foundation it will trash most of the building (not necessarily all of it).

To do some stuff, like swapping central piece, you have two options. You can straight out delete it, with unknown effect of what will be destroyed with it, or you can first MOVE it somewhere outside building space. Replace the piece with new one, then you can delete the old piece safely.

This can be used (or abused?) as a sort of glitch building, where you maybe want something "impossible". Or you are just getting annoyed with some piece that won't snap. Add another piece as sort of helper, to make snapping easier, then use the move trick to remove the "helper" without affecting your building's static.

Comments

I will keep comments on this article open, so people can add their own hints, tips, tricks, workarounds, and so on. Please keep it clean and polite. For questions please use POSTS - not this article comment section! Any spam will be deleted and blocked, and if too many people do it I will disable comments. Please use the functionality to help other builders like us!