Tips for designing a town or a village ? Frustrated on planning , need help

Hello,
          How is it going , i really love the game after like 1 year of following it i've got really attached by the characters. What really frustrates me is that i really suck at building,

I never know how to design or make a town feel homely or to be aestethic or even accessible and that frustrates me alot. Because my and everyone’s hearthlings deserve a great place to live in and not an awful place which i always make it seem. I am really passionate about old buildings , history, how town were made and i never know how to start organically and have fun.
I love the crafting and the personality of the game but i get really lost at building placement and about the economy of the game , i always feel like i am behind onto it .

Hi @EdwardDragonpaw.

Here on the discourse there is alot of player made towns in the different subforums. There is also a few youtubers that you can follow for inspiration.

Personally i always start a new settlement out with a crafting focus, like the carpenter or blacksmith and so on. The Crafter i have decided to be my main income in that city is what i design the layout around. So for example if i have picked the carpenter, i know i will need alot of wood? So already from the start i look for a place to plant my future forest for easy access. With other words i plan the city layout from a buisness point. Supplychain for one single craftsman. The rest comes down the line, when i at some point need a cook, i will place that close to the fields and so on. After a while the enemies become stronger and the need for guards at my “buisness” becomes more important, so i locate the chokepoints and place their quarters according to that.

Try and take a look at the city designs of the ancient or just older citys in the world? Or maybe just copy what ever you like when you see what others are building? At some point the mix of those copies will be your uniqe style :slight_smile:

Would love to see one of your towns!

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Even if you feel like you’re behind on something, the best thing you can do is keep at it. Keep trying new things, whether it’s abstract or logically placed, whether your village is dug into a mountain or built on top of trees, whether it’s designed around your crafts, food, or military. After you try enough things, whether you came up with them yourself or you drew inspiration from someone else, you’ll find elements of it that you’d like to keep - a fancy looking roof you’ve made, the layout of a farm, maybe a bridge between mountains. Take those good things and bring them with you. Add on to them or don’t.
That’s the beauty of a sandbox - it’s your world to test in, your world to learn from, and your world to improve.

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I just make master plans before I begin and fill in details that interest me as I go along, or as circumstances allow. I also look at uploaded Steam screenshots for inspiration. My old Rayya town looked like this:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/80341646687580345/0EAB81403B14CBCDCA4895817133A4CA00EF69D7/

My current Rayya town looks like this:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/80342258403394639/31FFA0B02856CFB7FD24EBF850178009CF93BBA2/

I’m actually using it to develop random larger projects because it’s self-sufficient:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/80342560213812753/43BF1C36A6EDD341638E95DCAA47E710DE53A5A7/

In fact, I’ve discovered that with ~600 clay and a lot of repetition, I can build individual rooms for the maximum number of hearthlings the game allows you to have, with each of them happy with their surroundings.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/80342560213838380/D2429D3A3A5DAB61B94F34602602F3D3D0DE056F/

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Holy Mother of Rayya that building is huge! Great job on the builds Nalano!!

A cool idea with farms on the ground floor and apartments on the floors above!

Awesome buildings @Nalano! i do prefer your first town with the courtyard kinda thing in the midle and the small balconies. The other buildings are really cool aswell but i just dont get that stonehearth feeling from them. I guess as pointed out earlier in this thread, we all have our own unique style and i saw at least a couple of details i will snatch from you :jubilant: thanks.

Ok i will post some screenshots and a savegame aswell (edit: well it seems i cant upload the savegame since its to large a file?) I dont play this town any more since it became to overcrowded, but it is one of my most worked towns to date. Hope there is just a small detail for inspiration in there? :slight_smile:

@EregionChannel - Thanks! I had to do it because the invasions kept tromping through my farms and knocking out half the farmers before the defense team was able to engage with them. With all the farmland within the town itself, I could then funnel everybody into a nest of turrets without loss of life and limb.

@Fornjotr - both my towns have a central courtyard - otherwise I couldn’t make sense of what I was doing in all the density! The extra buildings are just random attempts of mine to see what the buildings tools could manage. I could, I suppose, start building monuments and temples and things, but I prefer my buildings to be functional in some fashion that the game recognizes.

@nalano >.> any chance you have templates up somewhere? I do ok in forest but I suck at my rayya’s builds I’d love to peek at yours and maybe get some ideas XD

I’m not sure how the templates could help, considering they are very specific to the layout of my planned towns - common party walls, etc - but the basic principle is to lay out the street network first and be aware that if a wall isn’t facing a street, plaza or a canal, it should be blank because it will only be facing another wall.

Everything else is just staggering setbacks to present a variegated street wall.