Planning Mode

Planning Mode

Planning mode is a temporary, protected Creative mode bound to your building site. Nothing you do in it is real: when the plan is finished, the site is reset to its original state and only the blueprint remains.

Entering planning mode

Planning starts automatically when you set position 2 with the Builder's Wand. Before you switch to Creative, your inventory and game mode are saved to disk. If the game or server crashes during planning, the backup is restored the next time you join.

You can plan only one project at a time, and you may have at most maxProjectsPerPlayer active projects (default 3). Sites of active projects may not overlap.

What you can do

• Place and break blocks anywhere inside your site – including terrain. Levelling ground and digging cellars is part of planning.
• Open doors, trapdoors and fence gates. Vanilla's rule applies: right-click opens no matter what you hold, crouch + right-click places a block against it instead. An iron door still does not open by hand.
• Place chests, furnaces, signs and other block entities (as long as allowBlockEntities is on, which is the default).

Whether a door is open is not recorded in the blueprint. The builder always places doors closed, and opening or closing a door that already existed does not count as a change to the plan.

What you cannot do

Planning mode is deliberately strict – it is for placing and breaking blocks only:

• Nothing outside the site. Blocks outside your site are protected.
• No containers or interactive blocks. Chests, furnaces, levers and the like cannot be used while planning. Anything moved into them from the Creative inventory would come out as real items when the world is reset. They work again as soon as the plan is finished.
• No dropping items. Creative drops and Q / Ctrl+Q drops are blocked on the server.
• No entity interaction, no attacking, no normal item use.
• No TNT.
• No fluids (unless allowFluids is enabled).
• Falling blocks such as sand and gravel need solid ground below them, so they cannot fall out of the position you planned.
• Filled storage cannot be broken. Vanilla spills a container's content even in Creative, and resetting the world would duplicate it. This also covers storage from other mods (for example an AE2 drive with cells). Empty storage and other blocks with data – signs, machines – can be broken and come back with their data (text, energy, settings) when the site is reset.
• Items that are not blocks themselves, such as AE2 cables and parts, cannot be planned. Their content lives in block data, which a blueprint deliberately never stores.

Items that drop inside the site while you clear it are collected and discarded so they cannot survive planning.

Leaving the site

If you move more than planningLeashDistance blocks (default 24) away from the edge of the site, planning ends automatically: inventory and game mode come back. Only horizontal distance counts – you can dig as deep or build as high as you like. 0 disables the leash.

Your plan is saved, not discarded. The same happens when you:

• log out,
• change dimension.

To continue, open the builder's dashboard and press Edit plan.

Finishing the plan

Open the builder's dashboard and press Finish plan (or use /eb finish <project>). The mod compares the site with its original state and records every difference as the blueprint:

• Blue ghosts – blocks the builder will place.
• Red ghosts – positions the builder will clear.

Then the site is reset exactly to its original state, your survival inventory is restored and the material list is calculated. A blueprint is limited to maxBlueprintBlocks positions (default 100,000).

The blueprint stores the complete block state of every position – facing, door hinge, stair shape and all connections – and the builder places it exactly like that.

Editing a finished plan

Edit plan in the dashboard reopens planning at any stage, including in the middle of construction:

• The build pauses and the complete blueprint is put into the world as temporary blocks.
• You plan exactly like the first time.
• Blocks that are already built stand there as real blocks. If you leave them untouched, they drop out of the blueprint by themselves – you do not pay for them twice.

Materials you already delivered stay on the project. After finishing, only what is still open is charged:

• More planned → the difference is missing; the build continues once it is delivered.
• Less planned → surplus materials are returned immediately.

If the connection drops or the server restarts during editing, the edit is discarded and the project goes back to its previous state. The blueprint file is only overwritten when you finish, so an aborted edit only costs the edit itself – never the project.

Ghost colours and shapes

The ghost blueprint draws everything that makes a building recognisable with its own shape and colour, in the direction it will actually face:

Shape	Blocks
Door leaf with handle, orange	Doors
Flat plate, orange	Trapdoors (top or bottom)
Post with rails, orange	Fence gates
Rails with rungs, brown	Ladders
Post with rails, brown	Fences, following their connections
Thick post, grey	Walls
Thin pane, light blue	Glass panes, iron bars
Full cube, light blue	Glass blocks
Half height, blue-grey	Slabs (top or bottom)
Stair profile, blue-grey	Stairs, in their facing
Short stick, yellow	Torches, standing or on a wall
Flat plate, red	Redstone, repeaters, comparators, pressure plates
Small knob, red	Buttons, levers
Flat plate, grey-brown	Rails
Box with lid and latch, gold	Chests, ender chests
Cube with a front face, grey	Furnaces, barrels, dispensers, crafting tables, hoppers
Small and flat, green	Flowers, saplings, grass
Small and flat, brown	Flower pots, decorated pots
Very thin, light	Carpets
Flat, pink	Beds
Full cube, blue	Everything else
Full cube, red	Positions to be cleared