Hi gang!

I discovered this game some weeks ago and got immediately intruiged by all the mechanics.. so much stuff to do and discover. And just like many others I eventually got into base building. At first I made myself a platform with a bunch of machines on it, later on I actually made a bit of a home for myself.

However I soon learned about the dreaded reset mechanic... would we be loosing all our stuff and effort?

Fortunately it's hardly as bad as it seems at first: we're only going to loose our progress, but most of our items will be sent off to Eternaland which is our own private place that never resets. ...but what about our house?

Well, no need to worry because there are ways to save it. You can even easily rebuild the whole thing in Eternaland as well, and like I said: that area never resets, so your house will be safe.

Now, the mechanic itself is somewhat easy I think but because of the complexity of this game it's just way too easy to overlook things. So I figured.. why not make a guide?

Hope you'll enjoy and can put this to some good use.

Once Human is a game which provides different so called scenarios to play; a scenario is basically a story. In the first scenario (Manibus) you'll learn about the deviants and deviations, Rosetta, the dreaded monoliths and of course all the evil plans that are involved with it.

In the second scenario, Way of Winter, you'll now also be fighting the elements as well because effects like temperature will have a big impact on your progress.

Phases

Now, the thing is that a scenario is cut up into 6 parts which we call phases and all of them together make up for the full so called season. If you're in the game then press escape to go to the menu and you should now see the scenario banner in the top right corner:


Once Human, pause menu.

See what I mean? Now, if you click on that banner you'll be taken to the phase overview which tells you more about what is going on, and about the rewards you can earn. Keep in mind: this method works on all scenarios, the only reason it shows Manibus in this guide is because that's what I'm playing right now.

Season info

Whatever you do be sure to check out the "Season info" tab because it will tell you exactly what you can expect of that. It will also give you more information about the so called sign up process and what you can expect to happen with that as well.

See, this game is in constant development so... who knows what might change after I wrote this guide? ;)



Eternaland is your own private space which never resets, no matter what scenario you're playing. Basically you could consider this the real "main" realm of Once Human because when a scenario ends most of your items will end up here. Press 'i' to open your inventory and you'll see what I mean: instead of showing you the normal things that are in your season backpack you now get to see your spacetime backpack instead; this is the default inventory space for Eternaland.

You can enter Eternaland either from the main menu, but also using the previously shown pause menu. Just click the small island icon shown in the bar on the upper right side of the screen:


You can visit Eternaland from the pause menu...

So this is your own private playground. If you press F7 while on your island you can fully control how the environment should behave. Do you want to allow others to visit your island or should it be kept private? What do you think the weather should be? And of course... should survival elements be a thing here or not?

Building in Eternaland isn't free: everything you place here will require astral sand, and you can get that by selling some of your items. It also provides new things to unlock... while you can easily build here just like you did in the real world you can now also do some landscaping by placing (and removing) trees and other foliage. However.. those need to be unlocked, and you can do that by earning Astrealite which is a different currency used specifically for rare artifacts.

When in Eternaland you can press F8 to go to the island shop.. there you can purchase normal items which requires Astral Sand, and you can also purchase those special artifacts which require Astrealite. You can earn the latter by fullfilling some orders; see the next tab in that same screen for an overview.

As you probably know you have your own territory when playing a scenario. Here you can build your own living space where you can store your loot and craft new stuff to use.

Now, I don't know about you but I don't really prepare anything while building so when I make drastic changes I sometimes worry if they will really end up as good as I planned. What if I don't like what I'm doing and this turns into a disaster? Is there a way to go back to the way it was?

Fortunately there is!

House blueprints

Ey, I never claimed to be an amazing building artist ;)

Enter build mode by pressing 'b', then click the right mouse button to open the build menu. As you can see above the last tab is the "house blueprint" and this option allows you to save / secure your entire build.

Keep in mind: the build, not all your items which you might have stored in chests or other storage units like a fridge and such.

Also noteworthy is that this behaves just like when you're moving your territory: everything that's on a foundation gets saved (or moved), but all the items that are placed directly on the ground won't be part of the blueprint itself. Just like when moving: then those "loose parts" get removed and you'd get the resources back.

Making a blueprint is easy: just click the "Add blueprint" option.

You'll be asked if you want to save everything or just a single building; this option is only useful if you have split your building(s) into multiple parts. When in doubt just use "Save all" to include your full territory and everyone on it.

Saving my house as a blueprint...

As you can see it's quite easy.. just give it a name, optionally tag it and maybe add a bit of description as well. Once you confirm your entry your building will be fully saved.

Once again, just making sure: you're saving only the building, not any contents!

So, back to Eternaland we go!

Find a good place to place your house, enter build mode and go right back to the blueprint tab in the build menu. This time however we're going to click on the blueprint we want to place:

(re)building my house in Eternaland...

Before you do anything else... take good note of the section on the upper right corner of your screen: this will tell you exactly what is going to be build, how much this is going to cost you and also what parts won't be included. This is especially true when building in Eternaland because there are a lot of decorative items that are "season specific" so they only exist within the scenario you're playing but not outside of that.

Examples for the Manibus scenario would be the black nosed sheep doll, the Rosetta host, the luminous sunflower (aaww....) and even some billboards and specific lamps. These only exist within the scenario so can't be placed in Eternaland.

Build and House blueprint options

When you're ready you'll notice that you have 2 options which you can click... "build" or "house blueprint". Both options more or less do the same thing but not fully: if you use the "house blueprint" option you'll only get the main structure of your build but without any of the internal units. So, for example, if you placed any colored lamps then you can forget about seeing those reappear.

While this option may seem useless for now it actually isn't, because this allows you to build skeleton designs which you can then later fill in with any of your items. But that's a bit beyond the scope of this guide.

So click build, but... beware!

Before you click build make sure that your character is standing on a logical location in relation to your new build. What I mean by that? Make sure that your build won't be placed too far away from where you're currently standing, because the so called "holo terminal" or blueprint tripod will be placed where you are right now:

Placed my ghost house ;)

See what I mean? Now, here in Eternaland you're probably not going be using this feature very much, but even so: try to go closer to the holo terminal and activate it. It will show you exactly what parts still need to be placed, and in this case also how much remaining costs you're looking at.

How to (re)build

Don't worry, the hard part is now behind us.. well, assuming of course that you have enough astral sand for the rebuild process. But building itself is quite easy. Really: hop into build mode (I also strongly suggest that you enable fly mode) and then just click on a part to (re)build it. Easy!

... well, yes, but do keep some general rules in mind:

• Build from the ground up: so be sure to start with placing the foundation.
  
• The system isn't perfect: sometimes it may detect "overlaps" while everything worked just fine in the scenario. If this happens try to build in a specific order, but when all else fails: rebuild the part(s) outside "blueprint rebuild mode". *
  
• If you're experiencing glitches (like the ghost build disappearing) then try to place the build closer to the holo terminal, but if this behavior persists try to relog.
  
• When dealing with glitches then the stats don't always match.

* Regarding my 2nd point: once you remove the holo terminal then you're also ending the blueprint build mode. Sometimes this can be required to fix weird overlap detections, which also brings me to the last point:



Sometimes these stats don't match the reality of what you've build. As you can see I highlighted 2 items: the deer rug and the writing board, according to these stats those items haven't been placed yet. Yah, so about that:

Looks perfectly fine to me!

See what I mean? The stats tell me that the rug (shown on the left) and the writing board (right side) aren't there. As you can see they're definitely part of my rebuild, no problem. So why is this happening? Because the system has detected that these objects "glitch" into others, while in fact they don't.

So keep that in mind when you're checking the stats to make sure that you didn't miss anything: always do a visual check as well.

My house, on my Eternaland island...

And there you have it... even if the server resets and removes all my stuff then I'll still have my house available on my island with everything in it fully accessible to me.

Do you guys realize what this means? Truly means?

Fun fact: Eternaland doesn't use the memetics system, meaning that building availability isn't locked behind available material resources, but only astral sand. For example... at the time of writing I don't have enough (raw) materials available to build the advanced synthesis stand, but I do have enough astral sand to build it on Eternaland.

Now, that isn't a full proof solution of course because items which you craft in Eternaland won't "just" become available to you in your scenario. However, you can bring them over... at a cost.

But that's a story for another day ;)

For now our house is safe, and that's all which matters.

Thanks for reading, I hope this was useful for some of you.