Hello there new builders who want a good starting point, WoodReviewer here, and today I am going to be starting my look at ROBLOX’s default places, which are now called game templates. Not sure where they are located? Just open studio and under the “New Projects” tab are a bunch of places split between Basic, Theme, and Gameplay. Today I am taking a look at the Medieval place template under Theme.

However, if you don’t want to start studio, here is a link to the game on the Templates account that ROBLOX uses to store them. Also, if you are an admin reading this want want to fix the places before I can review all of them, don’t worry, I have a copy of each saved to my hard drive to review.

Where to begin, where to begin. You see, for the most part the medieval castle is small, and only has a few pieces of wood. However, most of the wood in it is wrong. Take this torch, for example.

Clear case of mad wood grain on the handle. But when the handle is fixed…

…Oh dear. See that? Even though the wood shaft should be solid, it is made of three pieces of wood. This could either be fixed by extending the bottom shaft and removing the top two pieces, but to keep it close to the original I just rotated the top two pieces.

Off to a great start. Only way the place can go is up. Unless you want to take a ladder, then you will probably just fall down.

Not only does it have bad wood grain on the vertical supports, but also the steps. Luckily, that was an easy fix.

Atleast there hasn’t been an actual stick anywhere that has improper wood grain. I mean, how can you get a stick wrong.

Well, technically it is a lever, not just a stick. Still poor form, though.

Ok, ok, enough of the simple “CLICK BUTTON TO ROTATE WOOD GRAIN” stuff. Lets move onto something that was a slight challenge to fix. Like this shield.

Should be easy.

Just rotate one piece of wood correctly and union it so all the wedges get aligned the new way. What could go wrong.

I could not union the shield together. The edges just did not cooperate. I’m not sure why, but the CSG modeler hates wedges. Luckily, Defaultio’s Curve Cutter plugin was around so I cut the desired shape out of a piece of wood.

And BAM, fixed, with almost no difference between the new one and original.

Up next we have a model I’ve been avoiding for a while. I ignored it in endorsed models, and in several places, but now I have no choice to talk about it. It is the Wooden Barrel by Yourius.

Now, the vertical wood grain is fine on the wood, it is the rings that are disturbing. You see, barrel rings aren’t made with wood, but with metal. And the way the wood is on the rings means they would have no support. So, why did I ignore this? Because it doesn’t look that bad, and does cut down on union count. However, now I have no choice to fix it.

…Luckily you just need to seperate the union one or two times and you get the rings. Then all you need to do is no union them together with the barrel and group them in a model and the barrel is fixed. Either corroded or regular metal work; I chose regular.

Speaking of changing materials, one of the last things to look at here is the main castle gate. On the bottom of the gate were these wooden spikes.

While I could have fixed the wood grain, I changed them to metal because metal looks better than wood as a spike, in my opinion.

Now, some of you may have noticed something else changed in those pictures: the wood for the gate. You are not seeing things; that was incorrect at first.

The wood grain on all the vertical pieces of wood and the top of the horizontal pieces was incorrect. However, I did something different rather than just rotating them. You see, in the original gate, the horizontal pieces were the full width of the gate, but the vertical ones were not the full height. So I made both of them that with the power of unions.

Not only does it look better when the pieces fall apart, having a bunch of long pieces rather than some short and some long, but it allows you to more quickly change colors on the gate, changing 10 bricks to change the horizontal wood color rather than 100 before. Also, the wood grain is fixed.

One last set things to fix, the draw bridge and the rest of the bridge.

It was a mess; on the bridge, the top of the wooden planks had the texture going from front to back rather than the long way despite that being how it was supporting the bottom of the bridge. The bottom was the same way, but the planks should have been going across the bridge while being held up by the support support, with the grain on the end going up and down, not side to side.  And on the draw bridge, the planks went front to back on the top but side to side on the side closet to the camera. Luckily, a few texture flips were able to fix this.

Two notes here. First, yes, I changed the pillars from wood planks to slate. You can’t see it, but there were other pillars supporting the bridge that were also slate so I changed them all to slate to be consistent. Second, the draw bridge is broke, but it was like that before I messed with the place. I am WoodReviewer, not ScriptReviewer, so the broken script falls under “not my problem.”

All said and done, how was the wood grain? Bad. I don’t think that there was a single piece that did not need to be fixed somehow. Especially as a place template for new uses, the wood grain should be better to show new users how it should be in places. Luckily, I can show them since I have the fixed version on my profile. And it is uncopylocked, so if ROBLOX or anyone else wants to take it, feel free. For those who want more of these game template reviews, don’t worry; plenty more are left.