How to use the 1.7.10 AW Structure Scanner

First, a few building tips

When you build a structure, build it in the air, floating by itself, or use MCEdit to cut out the structure and place it there after you’ve built it, this makes scanning much easier, and you can easily place and see the limits and boundaries of basements and dungeons that are part of the structure. You can find MCEdit here.

Prefer the use of “Builder Worlds” – flat worlds with no structure gen turned on, in which you place all the structures. This way, you know where everything is. Here’s an example of one of them:

Two essential tools to use when structure building are:

Build Helper 2

Instant Blocks

The Build Helper has simple to use point and click wands that allow multiple block generation or deletion and using them speeds construction enormously. Instant Blocks has a lot of structures itself, but also instant water blocks for filling oats and lakes etc. The AW mod itself comes with instant blocks and tools, but they may be cumbersome to use.

Once you have created your structure, you may want to use the AW scanner to scan the building, and then have it appear in the biomes you want, using the AW World Gen system. If you also use AW Mob Spawner blocks in the structure, and set them up before you scan the building, when the structure spawns, and players come within range, the mob spawner will spawn the mobs you set for it. These mobs can be any mobs from any mods you have loaded. Custom Mob Spawner is covered here.

Ok, so you have your floating structure, how do you scan it?

First, you need to be in Creative Mode. Go to the AW Creative Tab and take the structure scanner and structure builder orders and place them in your inventory. If you are using Monsters Spawners, place the monster spawner block in your inventory too. Heres how my Inventory looks when preparing for scanning or building.

From right to left in the inventory bar – Build Helper deletion wand, Build Helper creation wand, instant water block, instant lava block, Instant Blocks command wand, AW Structure Builder, AW Mob Spawner, AW Structure Scanner, A dirt block.

Ok, so we are going to scan this model of an Orc Hill fort, complete with its Orc NPC’s that have been placed by hand, not by using spawner blocks. – Yes – Any AW or Vanilla mob or creature can be scanned by the scanner and will appear when the structure spawns. It will not however see other Mods mobs, for those, you need the Mob Spawner blocks.

First choose a corner of the Orc Hill Fort and build a dirt column, 1 block wide, higher than the tallest possible tree heights in the biomes you want the fort to spawn in. You do this because the empty air blocks you scan will clear out all logs and leaf blocks above the structure when it spawns. If you only scan to the top of the structure, you will get cut off tree tops left above the structure. You can put in the dirt towers in MCEDit, but for this example we will do it by hand.

Now select the AW scanner by scrolling the highlighter on your inventory bar onto it so that it appears in your hand on screen. Now go to the opposite corner to the dirt column and go to the lowest corner block. You will see a white bounding box appear around it, when you get close to it.

Press Z to start scanning, the bounding box will now remain in position, and you will see an on-screen message saying “Set First Position 1/4”.

Fly up to the top of the dirt column now, and the bounding box will move with you, expanding to cover the whole of the area you are scanning. With your cursor on the top block of the dirt column, press Z and you will see an on-screen message that says “Set Second Position 2/4”.

You will notice that at this point the bounding box is now set in position, and you can do a quick fly around to check for errors, blocks out of place etc.

Happy? Yep, so now you have to get rid of the entire dirt column before you do the next part or it will appear in the structure scan. For this, you can use the deletion wand from Build Helper. Scroll across your inventory to the deletion wand, you will notice the white bounding box disappears! Don’t worry, it’s still there, you just can’t see it. Right click with the wand on the top dirt block.

Drop down to the bottom block of the column and right click again – presto! – column gone!

Now scroll back onto the AW Scanner in your inventory and the white bounding box will reappear. Now go to the front entrance of your structure, and point your cursor at a block that will be the first block above “ground level” and press Z. You will get the message - “Set Offset/Orientation Right Click to Process 3/4”.

When that’s done, simply right click on the ground level and the following screen will pop up:

This is the initial set up screen for world gen for the structure you just scanned.

First type the name of your structure into the box that says “Input name:” Orc Hill Fort

Then click on the box that says Setup Validation which will bring up this screen:

This might look pretty complicated, but it’s really not.

First choose how you want your structure to spawn – “ground” is usual for most structures. You will get used to what the others do later. So press “ground” – it will click, but nothing will happen, that’s normal.

Let’s look at all the tick boxes first:

Now tick the world gen box if you want the structure to appear in game. This enables it to spawn while a world generates.

If you only ever want the structure to appear once per world, tick the “unique” box.

Preserve blocks, is an advanced function that you don’t need at this stage.

Clicking on “Dynamic Block Reassignment” means that if the structure spawns in say a BOP biome, it will swop out woods used in the structure, for woods in the biome, stone etc. Might not always look good. Use it at your discretion.

If you want people to be able to build the structure in Survival Mode, then tick the last box, “Survival”.

Now let’s look at the boxes that all have “0” in them.

Border Size = This is the area around your scanned structure that will be cleared and levelled when it spawns. For the Orc Fort, I’m going to set this to 4 blocks. A big border makes it more difficult for the structure to choose a spawn site.

Max Fill = This controls if the structure can burrow down into the spawn site. I don’t want that, so we will leave it at “0”.

Selection Weight = This number is compared to all other structure weights that you might have set to spawn in the biomes the Orc Fort will spawn in. The higher the number, the more chance it might spawn, so lets set it to 50.

Max Leveling = This controls how much of the spawn site can be levelled to allow the structure to spawn. Lets set this to 4.

Cluster Value = This number is the structures value for possibly clustering with other structures that spawn around it. The default Cluster Value in the mod is 500, so as we don’t want too many other structures spawning around the orc Fort, we will set it to 450 – this almost guarantees that nothing else will spawn near it, as I know that I only have a few ruins at Cluster Values of 40 each that are set for the same biome. Alternatively, if you want a lot of other structures to spawn around it, you might set the Cluster Value to a low number, say 20 or 40.

Min Duplicate Distance = If it’s not a Unique structure, this number sets the minimum distance away that the structure can spawn again. So you don’t get too many of the same thing next to each other. If unique, you can safely leave this at “0”.

So now it looks something like this:

Ok, so that’s all the validation set up done, click done and return to this screen and click on “Select Biomes”

This list is EVERY biome created by every biome making mod, plus vanilla minecraft that you have loaded.

If you want to select which biomes the Orc Fort spawns in, tick “Biome White List?” and tick whichever biomes you want in the list below. The Orc Fort will only then spawn in the biomes you have selected. If you don’t tick “Biome White List?” then the structure will spawn in all possible biomes.

Once you’ve selected your biomes, click “done” to go back to the main screen again and click “Select Target Blocks”. This is a listing of all terrain blocks from every biome mod, plus vanilla, in your game.

The easiest way to select blocks is just to click on “Auto fill from Biomes” which will automatically tick every appropriate biome block available, and then click on “Auto fill Vanilla Blocks” which will add all minecraft terrain blocks. Of course, you can add or takeaway blocks yourself by scrolling through the list and ticking or unticking the boxes.

Click “done” to go back to the main screen.

If you want your structure to appear in certain Dimensions – then click on “Dimensions” type the number of the Dimension you want into the box, and select it.

So, now you have set Validation, selected your biomes and target blocks, and maybe Dimensions. Happy? (Remember you can keep going back into the screens to change things as much as you want at this point) When you are finished click “EXPORT” NOT “Cancel”. Export will create the AWS file for your structure, and you should see it in the game from then on.

A good way to check, is to open the AW Structure Spawner in your inventory bar, and see if the new structure is in the list there. And here is the Orc Fort spawning in game, along with its Orcs.