Hello admirers of wooden planks, WoodReviewer here, today I am finishing my long overdue look at wooden planks. But this post is not how to use the wooden plank texture, nor is it on how to make them better. This post is on how the wooden plan texture is broken in some scenarios. So, lets begin at the basics.

Different Appearance Than Wood

This is so simple it is surprising. Simply put, wooden planks have a much different color and appearance than regular wood. Just look.

The wooden planks has much more contrast; the darker parts of the grain is much darker, while the lighter part is much lighter. In addition, the individual wood rings. What does this mean? In builds it is much harder to have some parts be regular wood and other parts be wooden planks. So if you’re making a deck, for example, you expect the supports and decking to appear similar, but if you use wooden planks for the decking and wood for the supports, this will not be the case.

Wooden Planks Make Bad Supports

Remember this image from my previous blog?

Remember, in my previous post I said wooden planks should be able to be recreated with regular wood and this is the result: three pieces of wood stacked on top of each other.

For those unaware, stacking wood on top of other planks is not stable, and as a result this is generally a bad way to make supports. This is why it is important for wooden planks and wood to have similar textures, so wood can be used as supports without looking too different.

Wooden Planks Have Odd Lines

Look at these two pieces of wooden planks. They are the same size; in fact, the one on the right was a duplicate of the one on the left. But notice how the one on the right has a thin sliver of a plank on the left side? That is an issue.

Ever since I have started reviewing wood, people have said that is an issue I should address, but quite frankly I can’t; there is no way to fix it. Yes, you could copy the brick hundreds of times until RNG decided to give you one without the sliver, the texture does not get saved, so when you reload the place the texture could shift and you could have a worse sliver, no sliver, or a sliver on both sides. Here are the same bricks; notice how now the one on the left has a sliver.

This can be hard to see on only two bricks, so here are more.

After I save and reload, notice how some bricks have slivers while others don’t.

Larger Blocks Are Odd

Remember how I stated that wooden planks should have the lines on the end wrap around from the top to the bottom, like so?

That really only works when the planks are less than a stud or so thick. Take this brick that is 3 studs thick as an example.

When you try and recreate it with bricks to get the end and top correct, now the sides are incorrect.

There is no real way to fix this outside out having a dedicated end texture that had a grid of wood, like this. But as of now, with ROBLOX’s current system, brick that are 2 or more studs thick really don’t need to follow the rule about end texture connecting the top/bottom; only bricks less than 2 studs should.

However, that fix is not perfect for things like crates of chests. Ultimately, this is the only issue that has no true fix on ROBLOX.

Cylinders Look Terrible

Not only do they have the same issue with bricks of stacking wooden beams on top op each other, but the line that is used to separate the planks looks out of place. I’d advise against using them.

Nails Make No Sense

For this problem you need to understand how building works, mainly nails. You see, when you nail something into a board the expected result is that on the other side of the board there should be something for the nail to attached to. On ROBLOX, the plank texture only does this where planks connect. Take these boards, for example.

According to ROBLOX’s wooden plank texture, there should be nails on each side where the boards connect. As a result, there should be boards underneath these connects to hold the nails. As a result, this is what the board layout should look like, with an added two boards on the side for symmetry.

Here is an equally sized area of wooden planks.

So lets say I want to be a good builder and put a board under all the nails. I end up with something that looks like this.

Yeah… that does not look like fun.Not only are the gaps inconsistent, but there are far too many boards to even be able to use this on a practical scale. But that is not the problem. This entire exercise is pointless. Why? Remember how I said the texture on wooden planks shifts if you reload a game or a place in studio?

Now you need more supports, further increasing the part count, along with having a bunch of necessary boards that server no purpose. It just isn’t worth it.

Overview

If you are reading this and want to know how to fix it, the simple fact is you can’t (unless you use a custom wooden plank texture you upload yourself). All the issues I’ve listed cause improper wood grain, yet they are all ROBLOX’s fault. So, what can you do? Annoy ROBLOX. Tomorrow I will have a post on how ROBLOX can fix wooden plank texture so it can allow builders to make better builds.