Hello swashbucklers and scalawags, WoodReveiwer here. Today I am continuing my adventures of looking through the ROBLOX template places by taking a look at the Pirate Island template place, as always, featured on the Templates account and made by Quenty. Just as a reminder, all these places are open source and can be accessed by opening ROBLOX studio and on the home page clicking the “New Project” tab. Then, above the normal baseplates, where it says the option “Basic/Theme/Gameplay” select “Gameplay” or “Theme” to view the places. As another reminder, I am WoodReviewer, so my job only involves reviewing, and fixing, wood. Not balance. Not scripting. If the fact my wood rotation breaks something I will try and fix it. But if there is a major problem with a game I am usually unable to fix it due to my scripting ability, or lack there of.

Why am I bringing this up?

Well, the boats are not good at the whole “not sinking” thing. But this happened with the boats before I modified the place, meaning I did not break anything.

Moving on to the actual wood, what did I do to fix the place? Honestly, not much was wrong, and 90% of the issues were with the boat. It was not that the issues were hard, it was just that a majority of the boat had an issue.

This is an example. All the decking had a problem where at the end the texture did not go vertical so that the gaps on the end did not match the gaps on the top and bottom.

All the decking had this problem, so all the decking needed to be adjusted. A similar issue was on the sides of the ship. This time, the ends of the planks were fine.

It was the top that had the issue, with gaps connecting to nothing. It is worth noting that although this ship used a custom plank texture, the same rules apply that apply to regular planks.

That was most of the issues with the ship. There is one more that I will come back to later. Next to the sip was this dock to get to the main land. The vertical supports here were bad, as was the end of the wooden planks, again.

A few quick texture flips and everything was fixed, though.

Next up was the small hut on the island which, again, had improper wood plank textures.

The vertical wall had improper rotation on the door frame, and the trim in the hut had improper wood grain with the gaps going towards the walls, not along the side of the hut.

Last up was this chest. Overall the direction on the planks was not bad, it was just inconsistent with half of it going up and around and half going across.  Of course, you can’t texture flip CSG models, so I had to separate it and re-union it.

For those who aren’t familiar with unions, the direction of the wood grain, and selection box, is based on the first part selected. So in this case I oriented the cylinder the way I wanted the wood grain, then selected the other parts to form the final union.

And the result of the new union. Nice and clean.

Now, that was all the models with issues. But I said there was one thing left with the boat. And it was the back.

Now, regardless of if this is good or bad it just looks weird with the wood grain going in all different directions due to wedges. The easy way to fix this would be to union the parts together and re-apply the custom textures. However, the parts were wedges, and CSG dislikes wedges, so I had to resort to a different technique and used Defaultio’s Curve Cutter plugin to make new parts. They are not an exact copy of the original, be close enough that it is practically unnoticeable.

As always, if you want to look at the fixed version to use, here it is. Overall the place was slightly better than most. Yes, it had some issues with some parts, but most of the issues, such as the deck and side of the boat, are only issues if you have the place open in studio. In addition, there was a large amount of wood that was correct, such as the entire sail rigging and the bottom of the chest. Still, there was issues in it that should be fixed when showing off proper game building to new users.