The architect desk: design your own prefabs, then build them in any material

What is the architect desk?

It's a drafting table you craft and place in your world: a tilted walnut board with a blueprint pinned to it, a T-square that slides and a pencil that draws while the desk works, under an articulated lamp. Right-click it and you open a screen with two tabs: Design, where you draw your own prefabs, and Assemble, where the desk turns your drawings into blueprints and copies.

Openworld is a voxel sandbox on a whole, round planet: walk straight and you come back to where you started, under a real sky with Moon phases and eclipses, all the way to the Sun, by way of the Moon and the planets. On Mac (native Apple Silicon), Windows and Linux. Everything in it is made of 25 cm voxels, and the desk is where you make pieces of your own out of them: a garden chair, a lamp post, a carved window frame, a little fountain, a column capital. Things no catalogue has, because you invented them.

• 1 m³the cell you draw in
• 64voxels of 25 cm in it
• 8material slots per design
• 8copies per run of the desk

tap for the next step

How do I make my own prefab?

From the empty desk to a row of finished copies, here is the whole path. Drawing costs nothing; the blueprint and the copies cost exactly the matter they contain.

1. 1

   Craft the desk and bring paper

   The desk: paper, charcoal (the pencil) and paper on the top row, three planks in the middle, a stick in each bottom corner. A blueprint is drawn on a sheet of paper: three reeds in a row make three. Place the desk and right-click it.

2. 2

   Start a design

   In the Design tab, under My designs, press New, or Copy an existing design to start from it. Give it a name (up to 24 characters): it's the name your copies will carry.

3. 3

   Choose the materials of its slots

   A design has up to 8 slots. Give each one a building material you carry (planks, stone, wool, glass…). Slots are what make variants possible later.

4. 4

   Draw voxel by voxel

   Add puts a voxel against the face you click, Paint gives a voxel the chosen slot, Erase removes it, the eyedropper picks a voxel's slot, Fill repaints a whole connected area. Turn on Mirror and what you do on the left is done on the right. Undo and Redo are there, the 3D view turns with a right-drag and zooms with the wheel, and Layers hides the layers above so you can draw inside.

5. 5

   Save it

   Save: the design joins your list (48 at most; archive old ones to make room). The screen shows its cost: how many voxels of each material one copy takes.

6. 6

   Draw the blueprint

   Press Use on the desk, go to the Assemble tab, put a sheet of paper in the template slot and, in the material slots, the materials of one copy (the ones you drew it in). Three seconds later, a blueprint of your design comes out.

7. 7

   Build copies

   Put the blueprint in the template slot (it is never used up) and, in each slot, the material you want this time. The desk shows the result in 3D, then builds up to 8 copies at a time: two seconds, plus half a second per copy.

8. 8

   Place them

   A copy carries your design's name, with its composition listed underneath, and an icon drawn from its own voxels. Right-click to place it, like any prefab.

Placing and rotating a copy

A copy goes down like the game's other prefabs: whole, against the face you aim at, on the 1 m grid, turned to face you. You can turn it in four directions; it can't be flipped upside down or mirrored. The preview shows exactly the voxels it will take, in their materials.

Once placed, it isn't a fake model: it's real voxels of each of its materials, just like a wall you'd have built by hand. Broken standing up, it comes back whole, as long as every one of its voxels is still there in its own material. Crouching (Shift), it comes apart voxel by voxel, as raw material, so you can trim a copy on the spot.

Do blueprints cost materials?

Yes, and exactly what they contain, no more. A blueprint costs a sheet of paper and the materials of one copy, in the materials the design was drawn in. Each copy then costs one voxel of its slot's material per voxel it has: an armchair of 40 voxels takes 40 voxels of matter, spread over its slots. Matter is conserved both ways: breaking a copy never gives back more than it took.

One design, every material

That's the point of slots. Your design says which voxels belong together (the frame, the cushion, the seat), not what they're made of. At the desk, you choose a material for each slot every time you build: the same chair in birch for the kitchen, in granite for the garden, in quartz for the palace. Click a material in your inventory and it goes first to the slot that still lacks one.

Can I change a design later?

As long as no blueprint exists, edit and save as often as you like. Once a design has a blueprint, it is frozen, so the copies already out there stay true to it: saving your changes then creates a new design, and the old blueprint keeps working. Archive a design you no longer need: it leaves your list, and its blueprints and copies keep working.

Sharing blueprints with friends

A blueprint is an item like any other: put it in a shared chest or hand it to a friend, and they can build copies of your design at their own desk, in their own materials. Copies themselves can be traded too. Your designs are kept by the server you play on; saving one needs a player with an Openworld account. To set up a world for the whole group, see how to play with friends.

Invent new pieces, not copy-paste houses

The desk is built into the game: it lets you invent new pieces of 1 m that don't exist anywhere, in several materials, and craft them in survival like any other prefab. It doesn't paste a whole house; it gives you the custom bricks to build one faster.

It works hand in hand with the rest of the building tools: half slabs, pillars, stairs that turn corners and furniture placed to the voxel, all in the guide to building voxel by voxel. And for the furniture and lamps already in the game, see decorating your house.