I took the week off from actual game progress, but not from the game entirely. Just, mostly.

As previously stated, I intend to fully enclose as many completed factory buildings as I can stand to before I feel an overwhelming compulsion to do Literally Anything Else. This morning, as part of this project, I took on beautifying the Aluminum Works.

Unlike the Crystal O’s site, this building isn’t “out in the open” where I can do pretty much anything I want to, design-wise. It’s between two waterfalls and backed up against a modest cliff face. And since the refineries floor and the constructors floor take up almost exactly the same room there wasn’t much call for varying the sizes of the two machine floors to break up the, well, brick-ness. The box-ness. The booooooooooriiiiiiinnng-ness.

I brought a few existing, tested ideas to the decoration project: Slightly-inset ramp foundations with beams between them, sideways pillars as wall material, inset honeycomb windows paired with some triangular wall pieces, and tall sheets of glass windows with pillar spacers.

I used them all, because why not?

The logistics floors were enclosed in steel walls. Until there’s a better option, I prefer using that wall style to delineate where the logistics floors are. At the very least it helps break up the look of things along the vertical axis.

I added ramped foundations as I’d done at the Crystal O’s site but nudged them “into” the building slightly less, and positioned them such that the two inner ramps meet at the center of the front of the building. Then I added what I’m terming “ramp buttresses” (for now) on either side to meet and “support” the inner ramps. I’m not using the I-beam style of connection between the ramps as I did previously, mainly because I ran into a weird issue with the personnel elevator preventing me from building anything too close. Nothing was actually overlapping/clipping into the elevator, but the game wasn’t happy. This wasn’t the yellow “are you sure?” hologram, this was a firm red “nuh-uh.”

Using overlapping steel pillars worked out, I think: One each, attached to the two different pillar supports, creates an interesting result that almost looks like a discrete individual piece of material.

Of course, none of this could be replicated for the rear of the building.

So I went with one of my tried-and-true options: Walls with nudged-in hex window pieces, “masked” off with decorative bits of triangular wall to give it some kind of interesting shape. The rest of the back of the building is just plain walled off, except for where the cliff actually intrudes into the building. It’s fine!

Up front, I chose two very different options that… may or may not play nicely together. I had my reasons!

For the lower level, I went with more hex windows but couldn’t stack them very high due to clipping and z-fighting issues, so I sandwiched them between a mix of sideways pillars and 1-meter wall pieces, then painted some of the wall pieces and both sets of pillars to give just a bit more visual flair. (This design actually continues around the left side of the building, but not the right side, and no I don’t really know why I did that. Gotta love some asymmetry, I suppose.)

For the upper level, I chose my favorite design for refinery factories: Vertical sheet glass with pillars as spacers. Each stack of glass parts is lined up in front of a refinery, the next stack nudged over a few ticks to line up in front of the next refinery, and so on. Then I place large pillars to “join” the window sections together. I started on the outsides and worked my way in, and fortunately for me the space I left between the two groups of refineries (a group of four and a group of three, making different parts) could be perfectly filled by yet another pillar. I inset that one a bit and used steel instead of concrete to give some texture and break up the color scheme a bit. By way of a bonus, the different numbers of refineries led to a bit more asymmetry. (Could I have played with this by doing the ramp buttress/support thing differently? I suppose. But I didn’t.)

As night fell I realized that some interior lighting might be called for. The pre-1.0 days of (ab)using Lumen via display signs are gone, but it’s still preferable to the older light fixture pieces available.

I didn’t bother doing anything for the upper floor, as the “cathedral of refineries” does just fine with natural lighting most of the time.

With that, some roofing tiles (mostly standard, but with tar material used around the refineries’ exhaust pipes), and some more splashes of paint… I finished the job.

Not bad, honestly. Maybe not great, but not bad.