Tutorial: Scan Structures

With the Instant Structures Mod (ISM), you can not only choose from tens of thousands of structures and place them in seconds, but also scan your own structures.
These scanned structures can then be placed, mirrored and rotated in Minecraft worlds. Scanned structures are stoRed in the compact .str file format. This allows you to share your structures with friends and the entire Minecraft community.

This tutorial explains how you can structure properly.

With ISM, you can scan structures in two easy steps:

Wähle eine Fläche zum Scannen aus
Gebe Informationen zur Struktur ein

And you’re done!

1. Select area to scan

First, make yourself aware of which area you would like to scan. Here help questions like the following:

What is the base of my structure?
Does my structure have a foundation?
Do other structures overlap this base area so they should be removed before scanning?

Now that you know which area you want to scan, you can select it.

This works with creating a bounding box. With the bounding box you select a three-dimensional area in the form of a cuboid. Do this by marking a bottom corner and the diagonally overlying corner of the area. So, you choose two vertices that span the area to be scanned.

There are three options that you can mix with each other:

Place the Red block in the first corner and the Green in the other corner.
Select the bounding box item, with a left click you can place the Red block and with a right click the Green block. This method has the advantage that you can also place the corners in the air.
With the third method, you can choose the two corners very precisely, we explain this a little later.

If you play in survival mode, you can craft the Red and Green blocks as well as the bounding box item.

Once you have both corners selected, the bounding box will be stretched between these vertices. Everything within this box, including the margins, can now be saved by scanning. Now click on the Red or Green placed block. This opens the Scan Structure view of the StrExplorer.

Customizing Bounding Box

You may want to adjust the position and dimension of the bounding box.
For this you can replace the Red or Green block directly or with the bounding box item. ISM takes the newly placed block as a corner and then updates the bounding box. Here you can now use the third option particularly effectively.
In the Scan Structure view, you can specify the position of the Red and Green Blocks by coordinates. Click on Apply to update the bounding box and to adjust the range for scanning. This method is much more precise than the previous two but requires the exact coordinates.

Specify information about the structure

Now that you have selected the area to scan, we come to the second step: Specifying information about the structure.

There are four mandatory fields to complete before scanning and a few more with optional information. Required fields include the file name, the name of the structure, the creator and the genre.

Structures are stored under the file name in your Minecraft folder “minecraft/mods/ism-2/local-strs/”. The file name should be unique so that no structures with the same name are replaced.

Under Name you give a descriptive name to your structure.

As a creator, you can enter your nickname and optionally a URL to your website or profile of a forum.

Optional information

Description

Here you can add one or two descriptive sentences to your building.

Link

Here you can insert again a link, for example to the original blog post of your building.

Structure settings

Here you can specify an offset. An offset causes the structure to be offset by the specified number of blocks.

For example, if your structure has a foundation of the height of 2 blocks, you can specify an offset of -2. Then your structure will automatically be placed 2 blocks lower. This allows ISM to always place the structure optimally with other players.

After filling in all the required fields, you can start the scan with the Scan Structure button.
That’s it.

Summarized:

In the first step you select the area to be scanned. You choose two corners. The selection can be made with the Red and Green Block, the Bounding Box or in the “Scan Structure” view.
As a final step, you then provide information about the structure, such as filename, creator and genre.

This tutorial uses the structure “Permafrost | House” by MrFruitTree, visit his profile on Planetminecraft.