Ok, next update: I built this city!
I also figured out how to post more than one screenshot per post, so this update will be a little better illustrated.
The next big puzzle was how to design and layout the actual city itself. I wanted it to feel like an actual little town, with varied buildings, but I wanted a certain amount of uniformity too (buildings in a single location tend to follow the same sorts of styles). I also didn’t want to use a streets/blocks type layout because I feel like 1) that’s been done 2) a lot of medieval towns were a lot more haphazard and less structured and 3) I didn’t really have the space for it given the irregularity and limited size of the carved cavern.
Anyway, first thing I did was just stare at the space I had for a while. I decided to go ahead and use the repeating-pattern 12x12 square I’d drawn out to cover as much of the rest of the available area as I could, just to see how it looked.
Not perfect, but interesting enough I felt, and a different choice than just streets and city blocks.
So next was building all the actual buildings. This was a real puzzle but eventually I had what I felt was a flash of genius (with a helping hand from a certain Russian mathematician).
I managed to put together 12 or so basic designs that were nice and varied but that I think I’ll be able to reuse in future fortresses. I expect most of you can spot the gimmick:
Again, from the top down, external first:
Overall it was actually a lot of fun trying to fit as many of them as I could into the available space in a way that was aesthetically pleasing etc. One thing I learned while placing them: underground, you need two walkable tiles around each building, not just one; too close to a wall and buildings won’t be completable.
Theoretically, all of these have the same walkable surface area (four 8x8 tiles), but in practice the multi-story ones are worse, because more of that space is stairs. Most buildings took about a day to build, but there was some variation and some took as long as three days (for reasons that didnt’ seem explicable – it wasn’t just height or anything I could spot easily). I used 8x8 “tiles” as the basic unit of size so that each tetromino building would fit nicely within the 12x12 mosaic tiles while leaving walkable space around them (the game’s reliance on 4x4 mining blocks kinda forces the use of designs based on multiples of 4 when doing underground building). I didn’t use decorations or furniture in the templates since those can be individually placed later, just doors and windows; each building got a two-block-high foundation so that I could place them safely on the mosaic without messing it up. I tried to match the colors as closely as possible to the tetromino colors (though some, like green, weren’t available), but used red clay roofs and red stone columns throughout so there would be some commonalities of style.
Here are the building templates for anyone who wants to reuse them. This includes some earlier versions of some of them that are either slightly buggy or that weren’t oriented correctly for the space I had available. You may need to add front steps to a couple of them, and there are a couple of “missing” tetromino orientations I didn’t bother plotting out.
tetris templates.zip (555.0 KB)
Next step will be adding detail work and furniture placement to the city, then moving on to the exterior and finally carving out the main entrance and front defensive works. I may wait on that till Alpha 16, so we know a little better how archers work.
Calendar-wise I think I’m at roughly day 10 of Feastmun at this point.