All I wanna do....

[Rose]

I used to be able to stack barrels and stuff pretty successfully pre-shutdown, but now I can't seem to get them on top of each other. I get to levitate, you shift click and things go up, but they only go up a couple of inches.... and then when i release... they are waaaaaaaaayyyyyy over there on the other side of the room.. are there like default arrow keys that i can use other than my mouse... my hands dont seem to be as steady anymore i think...

[ltzerge]

That's certainly now how that's supposed to work. You hold shift, click and drag the item up, let go of the mouse button, then let go of shift. If you let go of shift during the lift process it will revert to normal surface movement. The same applies to moving a raised item along the horizontal axis using ctrl. If you want to stack them a different way, you can also tap F5 while placing the item to change its anchor point to surface, this will allow you to stack almost anything without having to use the shift lift.

[Dallayna]

I used to be able to stack barrels and stuff pretty successfully pre-shutdown, but now I can't seem to get them on top of each other. I get to levitate, you shift click and things go up, but they only go up a couple of inches.... and then when i release... they are waaaaaaaaayyyyyy over there on the other side of the room.. are there like default arrow keys that i can use other than my mouse... my hands dont seem to be as steady anymore i think...

 

Know this post has been up for a couple of months but I had trouble with this when I first started here too so I am sure that others will as well. I think it's because it's something that some of us just don't stumble onto right away. Thankfully, some quietly lurking synapses decided to fire off again at some point and I remembered this from live:

 

Change your perspective and/or move your character around.

 

Unfortunately, there's no better or easier way to explain it but, there's this.... "knack" to it that you can pick up after awhile but, it all boils down to- if the item isn't going where you want it to go from where your character is at the moment and how your camera is pointed, move the character a little bit and change your perspective. Somehow or another that affects how and where the item you have highlighted tends to move around.

 

Also, I don't know if this makes it any better (because sometimes you don't even have to move now) or worse (because now there's even more settings to check) but, thanks to the changes from i25, also changing/disabling/enabling your angle snap, grid size, etc, makes a difference as well.

 

Lastly, always check that room clipping as step 1 (you have no idea how many times I forget to check it or have accidentally hit the button trying to change the attachments without knowing in just this last month since I've been here).

 

Anyway, the best advice I can think of is just play around with all of that when things are going where you want them to or aren't behaving the way you'd like. After enough time, you start to get a feel for how things behave in relation to where you're standing/hovering, how your camera is angled, etc, etc, etc which makes it easier to do as you continue to build.

 

TL;DR

Move around and play with every setting you can find- usually, you can eventually slip whatever item your working with into whatever location you want to put it. Hope this helps other folks like us that don't really think of this right away because it is frustrating until you start to pick up the knack. :D

[PeterDutcher]

When you release, release the mouse button first.

 

Also, how high you move it is related to your angle. Sometimes you can only move it a little and have to do it a second time to lift higher...maybe adjust your point of view first.

[ajax34i]

As the others have said:  Hold shift and drag up to lift objects, but release the mouse first, and the shift key last.  For horizontal movement, ctrl is the key.

 

In practice, you ALSO have to be able to click on the actual material of an object.  It's very easy with water or fire effects, for example, to click "through" and start moving the object behind them, because you absolutely have to have your mouse arrow on the red parts of the "effect" icon, and not in any of the spaces in between, at the moment when you click.

 

It also stops working if your mouse arrow gets too close to the edge of the screen, OR if you pass your mouse over any of the game's UI elements.

 

Ultimately, if you're having trouble with it, and especially if you're trying to put a group of objects up in the sky, my suggestion is to build scaffolding.  Use dock planks or some of those stone columns or rectangular stone blocks to build a flat platform, angled or positioned however you want it, then raise it up there and use it as a surface to anchor everything else to it.  This will line up the height and angle of rotation of all the objects you put on it.  And when you're done, you can delete it very easily, and everything will stay in place.