Some weeks ago I started making a ship for based on NZ-43 (14C) and while I was happy with the basic result it helped me mostly to get an understanding how such ships were made.

I never cared much about ships before and had absolutely no idea about this topic at all. During my research to close that gap, which consisted mostly of reading into Flevobericht, 331 (ISBN 9036910862) and following the awesome actual model builds by @silverman834 at https://modelshipworld.com/topic/25300-a-small-cog-by-silverman834-scale-120-c-1410-finished/ did I decide to reapply the lessons learned and go for the famous so called “Bremen Cog” ship.

This is a very specific ship type that was widely used from the 12th century on for trade via the sea. It was between 15 to 25 meters long, had one square sail and was crewed by approximate 12 people that worked in shifts. Unlike other sailing ships it was very reliant on wind direction but it’s flat bottom permitted it to be beached without taking damage so it could be unloaded everywhere e.g. during low tide. The aftercastle on it’s stern deck makes for a very distinct impression and can be recognized from many period depictions of ships. Several full sized replica have been built to this date.

The “Bremen Cog” is the best preserved example of this ship type. It’s wreck from ~1380 was discovered in the Weser in 1962. It took almost 40 years until it could be presented to the public. It’s my understanding that the conservation techniques applied had to be developed first. It’s on display in the German Maritime Museum and the cog apparently played a huge role in the founding of the museum itself: https://www.dsm.museum/en/exhibition/exhibitions/bremen-cog

The museum is located in 27568 Bremerhaven / Germany (and closed during the wintertime). No idea when I’ll get the chance to visit this but the museum does also foster a YouTube channel and one of the most recent videos up on their channel is a drone flight around and through the Bremen Cog made by Dennis Vogt so make sure to check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjYigiyF014

So why did I take this effort on me to recreate this famous ship type once more in a game? Curiosity and hyper focus I guess. I can tell you it was cumbersome because the game does not support bend objects so everything is basically a block. It does also not feature tools for e.g. Bézier curves or something. I spent quite some hours trying to get the hull and proportions right and while the superstructures are kinda opinionated I’m really happy with the end result. I also saved a lot on the ropes and while I know in theory how this should work and look it’s just _too much work_ to get this right in the game. So I only went with the most important running ropes. I hope any navigators reading this can forgive me 😉

The final result of the Bremen Cog under sails

I also prepared a variant without a sail and maybe I’ll even create a version with a reefed sail and with another version of the bow someday. I don’t know yet for I feel very exhausted from this little side project for now.

The final result of the Bremen Cog without sails

It’s also very sparse on final details because I can imagine that the blueprints for this ship will see a lot of reuse on various servers of the game so it should be really easy to individualise each placement with different colours or textures or cargo.

Speaking of: The blueprints for Rising World (Unity) can be downloaded from here:

You’re free to share and adapt this work as indicated by the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Please do inform me if you make use of this simply because that would make me very happy. It’s not required though.

Working on a loosely based on NZ-43 (14C). It’s approximately 12m long 🙂

First time I’m trying my luck with a vessel and not a building. The curving is difficult to realise in tho.

It started life in the old Java version of the game because the new Unity version has no posters yet. I had to segment the plan of the cog (carved in a very bad resolution from a PDF) into several in-game posters that had to be aligned in-game again to get the proper measurements.

After that I moved the blueprint of the frame over to the new version and started putting planks on it. A cumbersome process during which I learned a lot. I’ll probably make another and more improved hull based on the gathered know how.

I also fell straight into another “not yet implemented” trap. RisingWorld has a flip command to mirror an object and I kinda assumed this would work with blueprints too. It does not. And I was really not looking forward to put plank on both sides of the frame.

Luckily most of the leg work to read the binary blueprints was done by @paulevs before who released https://github.com/paulevsGitch/BlueLib under the MIT license. It has been a while that I touched Java but I could come up with some code of my own that would flip the planks only (I used rounded cubes for the planks exclusively) making use of this lib and the very first try at it looked promising already.

Here is the source I came up with in case you wonder:

package blueprint.flip.maybe;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;

import paulevs.bluelib.blueprint.Blueprint;
import paulevs.bluelib.blueprint.BlueprintIO;
import paulevs.bluelib.blueprint.element.BlueprintElement;
import paulevs.bluelib.blueprint.element.BlueprintElementType;

public class App {
    public static BlueprintElement cloneBlueprintElement(BlueprintElement el) {
        BlueprintElement element = new BlueprintElement(el.type);
        element.setPosition(el.posX, el.posY, el.posZ);
        element.setSize(el.sizeX, el.sizeY, el.sizeZ);
        element.rgba = el.rgba;
        element.setRotation(el.rotX, el.rotY, el.rotZ, el.rotW);
        element.setSurfaceOffset(el.surfaceOffsetX, el.surfaceOffsetY, el.surfaceOffsetZ);
        element.texture = el.texture;
        return element;
    }

    public static Blueprint readBlueprint(String pathname) {
        File file = new File(pathname);
        Blueprint blueprint = null;
        try {
            blueprint = BlueprintIO.read(file);
        }
        catch (IOException exception) {
            exception.printStackTrace();
        }

        return blueprint;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        final Blueprint blueprint = App.readBlueprint("/path/to/Blueprint-flip-maybe/cog_base_split_1670726695.blueprint");
        System.out.println("Opened " + blueprint.name);
        System.out.println("Blueprint has " + blueprint.elements.size() + " elements");

        ArrayList<BlueprintElement> elements = new ArrayList<BlueprintElement>();

        blueprint.elements.forEach(element -> {
            if(element.type == BlueprintElementType.ROUNDED_BLOCK) {
                System.out.println("T: " + BlueprintElementType.getElementName(element.type));
                System.out.println("pX: " + element.posX + "pY: " + element.posY + "pZ: " + element.posZ + " rX: " + element.rotX + "rY: " + element.rotY + "rZ: " + element.rotZ);
                BlueprintElement el = App.cloneBlueprintElement(element);
                el.posX = el.posX * -1;
                el.rotY = el.rotY * -1;
                el.rotZ = el.rotZ * -1;
                System.out.println("pX: " + el.posX + "pY: " + el.posY + "pZ: " + el.posZ + " rX: " + el.rotX + "rY: " + el.rotY + "rZ: " + el.rotZ);
                elements.add(el);
            }
        });

        elements.forEach(element -> {
            blueprint.elements.add(element);
        });

        blueprint.name += "_flipped_X";

        File outputFile = new File("/path/to/Blueprint-flip-maybe/" + blueprint.name + ".blueprint");
        try {
            BlueprintIO.write(blueprint, outputFile);
        }
        catch (IOException exception) {
            exception.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

I’m kinda happy with the result. This Lib also allows me to change the texture of the elements so I don’t have to worry how the used texture during the construction may look in the end.

Now onwards to improve the curves. I really wish for a bend mode where the beginning would snap on to an existing object and the opposite plane could be moved around individually.