What is a Spore megabuild? How are they made? Why make a megabuild in the first place instead of just making a regular creature/creation? Are you insane? What’s wrong with you?

I got all the answers and more below! As well as progress pictures of one of my megabuilds, Ysera from World of Warcraft!

A megabuild in Spore is a creation that is made up of multiple different creations (mostly creatures). All of these individual creatures are assembled in the Adventure editor (where you can make custom missions and stuff) like a jigsaw puzzle! So, the head of Ysera is one singular creature, as are her limbs, her left wing, her right wing, ALL FOUR of her legs are also individual creatures, her tail, etc.

So…why make a megabuild instead of just doing all of the detail on one creature?

Well, back in the good old days of vanilla, unmodded spore, people wanted to show off their full potential for creature creation. People wanted to add LOTS of detail to their creatures, but there was a problem: the creature editor in vanilla spore has a complexity meter, meaning it has a cap on how many parts you can actually use before you’re literally not allowed to add anymore parts. There is a cheat that you can type into the console called “freedom” which unlocks a little bit more room on the complexity meter, but it’s not TRUE freedom of the complexity meter, as you can very much still reach the complexity meter cap even with the cheat turned on (I did so many times as a child).

Sooo, spore players were looking for ways to share their big huge epic creations that they wanted to make on the sporepedia, for everyone else to see (and download). This is where adventures come in.

As I said earlier, adventures are custom missions that you can make. You can set the scene, the characters, the story, the things you’re supposed to do to complete the mission etc. And within the adventure editor are these like…plasma gates.

These can be locked or unlocked via keys and such (if you chose to place them in the adventure, of course), and a very interesting thing about these plasma gates is that you can make them do 1 of do things: make them invisible, or disguise them as a creation that you or another player made. However, there is a caveat, and that caveat is that you can only disguise the gates as either buildings or vehicles.

At some point though, someone out there found a work around, in which you can choose to edit the building you’re going to disguise the gate as before you officially choose it, and then you can view the sporepedia as you’re currently editing the building…allowing you to view creatures in the sporepedia! And then…you can click the edit button on those creatures, switching you to the creature editor. Then you can click the “save and exit” button within the creature editor, tricking the game into disguising the gate as the creature instead of the original building you were editing! Once it was found out that you could do this, AND that adventures with the gates-disguised-as-creatures in them could actually be shared on the sporepedia for others to download and play, it then became obvious that you could probably use this trick to make what we now call megabuilds. In which each of these individual parts of the body (head, body, limbs, tail, other details etc.) could be disguised as gates, and then moved around to create a bigger, more highly detailed creature than what you could actually make in the creature editor!

Obviously, with mods, you can remove the complexity meter and just put as many parts as you like on a creature, but with this comes the risk of your game crashing with the more parts you put on your creature. This has happened to me within the past week alone (specifically with the Tyranid warrior), and it will continue to happen to me for as long as I have Spore installed on my computer because Spore is just Like That. Megabuilds, on the other hand, allow me to kinda circumnavigate the chance of my game crashing with such a detailed creature (for example, if I’m only detailing one limb as opposed to the whole body), giving me more breathing room, and allowing me to add significantly more detail instead of having to say “okay well I guess I can leave those details out, they’re not important, I don’t want my game to crash again and lose all this progress.”

TLDR; Megabuilds are highly detailed big ass statues in spore made up of different creatures that look like limbs, all stitched together. Yayy!!!! We’re an evil scientist! Now here is how I made Ysera, in case you wanted a play by play of how I make my megabuilds (if you perhaps wanted to make your own).

How I made Ysera

Now, personally, IDK how other megabuilders make their own stuff, but my process for starting a megabuild is this: I basically start with a “base” body that has all of the limbs, and then I pose them how I want them to be posed. I do not add any details. This base doesn’t even have eyes! We’re doing this purely to get the pose correct, so that we can use the base as a reference for when we’re putting all the individual pieces together in the adventure editor. We have to keep this base creature, and make sure not to save over the top of it, even after we’ve finished making all the individual body parts! Here’s what the Ysera base looks like:

Now..we have to start detailing. I had references of Ysera’s most recent model (from Dragonflight) with a variety of different angles, so I used those pictures to make her as accurately as I could. I usually like starting with the head.

(Before I get into the progress pictures, I should note that with every different “body part” i’m making, I’m essentially making a copy of the “base” creation, removing everything except the limb/body part i’m working on, and then detailing it. This means I keep the exact posing of the wings, tail, limbs etc. so that when I use the base body as a reference for putting stuff back together in the adventure editor…all the body parts should be in the right shape/pose!)

Anyways, because it’s possible to resize the gates-disguised-as-creatures within the adventure editor, I actually got the “croc kisser” mouth and made it twice as large as it was on my base creature, so I could more accurately see what I was doing (and add more detail). Then….well this is the hard part isn’t it? Idk how to explain how to make stuff in Spore. That’s like trying to explain how I draw things lmao. But what I usually start with is “sculpting” the face, by placing knurldowns upside down on the head, and then positioning them and resizing them until I get a face shape that looks nice! You can also skip the mouth altogether and do the sculpting on an elongated limb (which is what I did for The Windsinger and the Tyranid warrior) which honestly I prefer because sometimes sculpting on top of an already existing mouth/head can be really annoying!

After 3 hours of non-stop work, here is what the finished head looked like!

Sorry that I basically did a “just draw the rest of the fucking owl” to you all, buuuut I didn’t want to make this explanation any longer than it already was sooo..yeah lmfao.

Initially I had made her floating headpiece on the same creation, but when it was rendering in the adventure it looked. well. strange. so I elected to make her headpiece separately, and to make it in the spaceship editor instead of as a creature, and honestly…I’m glad I did so, because it looks super cool and I get to actually have it properly floating above her head, and I can also position it how I want.

After that, it was time for me to move on to the limbs! Honestly, if you’re like me and all 4 limbs have slightly different different poses (which is done by pressing “a” on the keyboard and clicking on a part and/or limb to allow it to be moved without the limb on the other side moving), it’s best that you actually detail the limbs BEFORE you make them asymmetrical and pose them, so that you have the luxury of symmetry/mirrored building so you only have to detail one leg. Then you make the legs asymmetrical, pose both legs and either save them as a duo, or save them individually (I chose to save them individually so that I could have more control on the limb posing in the adventure editor, but that’s just me being extra lmao).

For the wings, I chose to individually detail 1 limb after the other, since I knew I would need differently shaped and sized webbings for both wings, and it wouldn’t make sense to detail both of the wings and THEN pose them, since I knew that would mess up all the parts I’d already put on the wings. Thankfully there was only two of them so it wasn’t a big deal! The “organic helper” mod which gives you a lot of individual webbings for wings is…well, quite helpful! And it also means significantly less parts used for the wings, meaning I got an opportunity to add more detail, if I wished.

Okayy and then it was time to do the body. Not much to say tbh! This was probably the easiest part of the megabuild to do since I (for the most part) wasn’t dealing with any asymmetry and I didn’t need to put a huge amount of detail onto the body.

Finally, the last thing I made was the tail!!! This was not as hard as I thought it would be, it was just tedious and time consuming. At this point I was getting kinda of this megabuild xD I just wanted it to be over already. It took about an hour to make the tail (mostly fiddled around trying to make ysera’s tail pinecone look like….well, a pinecone. I do not think I succeeded in making it look like a pinecone. I tried my best).

Then….it was onto putting the pieces together! This is where I opened up the adventure editor, and used the gates-disguised-as-creatures trick to get all of the different body parts assembled! This is also where the base I made came in clutch!

Sooo, the first thing I put down was the base body, and then I started layering the completed Ysera body pieces over the top of it.

Then I just had to do that a bunch of times with all of the pieces, delete the base body, tweak some of the limbs’ positionings and bam!! The megabuild was complete!!!

I hope this was an informative article about Spore megabuilds! If not, then I guess I can just eat dirt from the ground or something. I hope this helps others understand how megabuilds are made and inspires people to make their own.

If you have any further questions, lemme know about them on my guestbook, and I'll do my best to answer!

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