Can You Save Buildings With DataStores?

[QuackingDuckQuack (Grace)]

Hey, developers! I was wondering if you can save buildings with datastores. Take Bloxburg, Adopt Me, and other building games for example. When you leave, your build saves.

I know you can save leaderstats with datastores, so I’m wondering if you can do the same with buildings.

If you can’t please tell me what way you would need to do it, like another data saving method.

[sniper74will]

No, it is not possible to save instances. Although, you can save color, size, shape, and positions of the part.

[kylepo99]

Indeed you can save just about anything with datastores. You can’t save instances directly but you can save properties about those instances and then rebuild them. For that you will need to sterilize your building into a savable format. I am no expert on the topic so I shall link a few topics below, but you are basically taking properties (Location,size,color) and saving them to a table for each block. Then when someone joins the game again the server will rebuild the building using those properties.

How to save parts, and the idea of Serialization

This article is the answer to the famous question “How to save objects using Datastore” and many other ways to word it. If you played with Datastore for enough time, I think you already know that Instances such as parts and models ect. can’t be simply saved using :SetAsync(), which makes it hard to save objects. Most people, with games that are supposed to have slots and stuff on them that you want to save, get stuck when doing this, although, I think finding a way to go over this is quite eas…

Additionally depending on the size of the building you might need to compress some data so you don’t hit datastore limits. I have linked a resource below that might be of some aid.

Compression for limited data (Datastore)

Are you sure that that other way will not take up too much space then? Anyways, you can either listen to my (probably bad) explanation Or watch the video I linked before, if you haven’t done that already. Basically, huffman is a way to compress characters (or other “single” token stuff, like block IDs) into a long binary string. First you have to construct a huffman tree, I’ll explain that a bit later on. It will look something like this: [image] How to decode the binary string: Read fro…

Most efficiently saving data

I wouldn’t say your method is horrible, but it can definitely be improved to use less memory. As you use predefined Droppers, it is possible you can assign a number value or a string to a dropper, i.e: {tick(),1} in a module script elsewhere on the game… {[1] == “Dropper1”; [2] == “Dropper2”}` Also, it can’t hurt to do a bit more management with your table. Maybe assign another value to that tick instead of having it in the open, and put all of the other points in a separate array: { tickV…

[ItzMeZeus_IGotHacked (notzeussz)]

Although you can’t, this will be involving OOP programming. There’s a tutorial about it. You should check it out.

[starmaq]

It does not really. All what’s needed is knowledge about tables and maybe dictionaries in particular, since that’s what the idea of serialization is centered on.