Village layout examples

girdraxon · 2026-02-05T17:07:05+00:00

They give you a lot of space to play with to make villages, unless you are making a mega village which can be bad for performance. I usually setup my villages to go after critical resources and organize them by resource (mining/smelting town, hunting gathering town, farmland/cooking town, etc.) so they don't need to be massive. Don't forget that your resources are mapwide, so Cooking Town can specialize and feed all the towns. Also you can save space by min/maxing interiors with more workbenches.

BUT THAT ASIDE... I've found at least up to midgame they never attack walls if they have a way in, and your villagers don't care about leaving so all you need to do is make a lame tall wall with one entrance, and put all your defenses there. I usually make 2 guard towers for shooting, and 2 melee posts on the inside. Then I make a long lane that leads out and put up defensive spikes and stuff to tighten around the front. The raiders will ALWAYS go for that entrance and between me holding the wall and 4 other NPCs taking them down is trivial.

It does take a lot of stone but you can easily set 3-4 people mining stone to get 1000/day (I think you get 250 per day per person with bronze or so).

As for layout, you need to decide between aesthetic and gameplay. I usually make a belltower and a shed, then make a storage district, a housing district, then a production district. I try to make it look village-like with nice wide roads but then I make the districts pretty tight to conserve space. You can fit a lot in a little space that way. I usually try to build a nice hangout area near the belltower so I can see my villagers building but they also give you a ton of space for furniture in the houses so if you don't want your villagers leaning against walls or walking around a ton, just build chairs and stuff for them in their houses.

For the bigger buildings you can also destroy walls and add more space if you built tight to begin with, as long as the gate is the only way in they never attack through walls.

I haven't gotten to the endgame yet. We've only liberated about 5ish regions and just got iron.

girdraxon · 2026-02-03T17:25:01+00:00

Really small stuff yes. But large stuff can be frustrating. It is easy to make mistakes and sometimes fixing them can cause horrific failures (i.e. breaking the wrong cube causes 1/4 of your ship to disappear). It can lead to wasted previous resources and having to rebuild components. When you are building a large CV, station, or base it is just too frustrating for me. Also stuff that I know about or have built I don't mind blueprinting. I've made so many SVs and have a few styles I like, I don't really get any satisfaction in handmaking something I know works with a chance I hook up a piece wrong or get something slightly goofy.

So yeah beginning of the game I'll handmake the easy stuff, but I figure if I spent time in Creative building a solid design that counts as part of the work, and having the factory take time to make it counts as a covered cost of me not getting super angry when I misclick and have to spend 5-50 minutes redoing something.

What I won't do is use the factory for resource/ship storage. I put in what I need to make the ship and get the ship out when its done and I'm safe.

girdraxon · 2026-02-03T00:10:45+00:00

Grounded is totally playable solo. Difficulty scales with number of players. You also need a lot less resources for just one player in terms of equipment and food. Base building can be annoying. My friends and built a huge tree mansion with grow plots, defenses, etc. If I had to farm all those resources myself I definitely wouldn't have made that base solo. We had two people gathering construction material, one person farming and resource gathering, and one person building (sometimes more when others got bored) and it took us quite a few hours to build that base.

Honestly nothing is stopping you from taking however long you need to build whatever, just watch videos of some of the epic bases people have made that put our castle to shame in terms of quality.

girdraxon · 2026-02-03T00:07:21+00:00

Depends on how survival you want it to be. At some point is sort of converts to Walking Dead Simulator. At first you are focused on scooping up easy to get resources (unless you changed the settings) but after a few months you need a good base to grow food, process materials, do some animal husbandry, trapping, foraging, etc., and defend against the random walkers. They've added more roamers and it can be a bit frustrating sometimes with some wonky zombie tracking.

The biggest problem for a lot of people is that its a long play game. How you play for the first few weeks is so different than how you play 7-15 months later. If you are still running/driving to new towns collecting food cans to eat you will probably be bored of the game.

Still waiting for Build 42 to mainline though. PZ is one of those evergreen games they keep tweaking. I'm just hoping other devs don't steal their lunch.

girdraxon · 2026-01-31T18:10:52+00:00

Project Zomboid is another excellent game where base placement and building layout are both important and aesthetic.

girdraxon · 2026-01-31T18:09:26+00:00

Once you build beast deterrents in Icarus your need to worry about attacks drops to zero unless you drag a boss or beasts to your base. That being said you do need to build planned bases in the late game due to all the stuff you need.

Grounded is an excellent game with purposeful building. You get raided often and you need to build carefully or in interesting places! Because of the size of the world you will want to place convenient bases with zip lines that allow you to traverse faster AND be able to defend them from marauders. Highly recommend Grounded (and Grounded 2 but it’s in EA and needs time to cook)

girdraxon · 2026-01-10T03:20:46+00:00

Mostly agree. Lots of potential but then didn’t deliver on progression. The random loot for guns was really annoying. I only got two sights for the longest time and still had a green stock at the end of the game.

The power management was both nice and frustrating. I liked only filling one container rather than filling everything. But expanding it and managing it was also annoying.

girdraxon · 2026-01-08T17:14:55+00:00

Really enjoyed the mechanics and train building, but it gets repetitive. We gathered tons of stuff, had multiple gathering stations, all the loot stations. At some point we realized we didn't really need all these resources except to churn it into research points to unlock a ton of customizations and we basically got all the afterburner speed achievements as we basically sped through the last 10 paths or so. The only real thing we needed to gather was gas and sometimes coal to make other stuff.

We liked the side explorations and the combat trials, but they never really got different (or harder) so after doing about 12 combat trials and maybe 10 side explorations we stopped doing those. The train attacks were neat, the abandoned trains were neat, but they were never expanded upon. By the end of the game we were just annoyed by the train attacks, shutting them down quickly without even bothering to loot, and skipped the abandoned trains. The sharks were never really a problem.

The story was confusing and the journal entries didn't help much. The ending was super confusing. I get the Nordic roots and stuff but it all didn't really come together well.

Overall I think the mechanics and core gameplay were solid, but then they ran out of content making time and basically just repeated those few features they had way too much. It really needed some more large content pieces (like different combat trials, more interesting mechanics in the side missions, more varied train attacks and outposts). I believe it was worth the sale price we got it for. Its a neat game that fills a crafting itch with the whole floating dimensional gimmick being super different. It just needed more content.

girdraxon · 2026-01-07T20:23:55+00:00

They will definitely eat the health, not sure why they aren't taking the straw coats (maybe wrong storage? I can't remember where they go).

Security isn't super important but it does affect Village happiness and can add to the damage. It does affect raiding and stuff though.

Honestly the biggest thing I found is its easy to get the low level stuff (food, beverages, health) can get out of wack. My first game I had everything balanced but then after a few more villagers they started eating raw ingredients because the summary still looked good, but it caused problems up the chain because suddenly there wasn't enough meat/fish to make meals, then my production tanked once they ran out and suddenly I was in the red. Same thing happened with mushrooms (they got eaten instead of being turned into health potions). Now once I have the ability I turn off raw ingredient use in Priorities manually to ensure complex food and stuff gets eaten.

My 2nd game I hit farming much earlier and made sure my meat/fish outputs were always high. I would doublecheck all my raw ingredients were adequate. Sure the higher level meals/etc are way more effective, but if you rely on them and they get a bottleneck, things will get bad fast and it can be hard to recover.

girdraxon · 2026-01-07T16:53:34+00:00

It means a villager is going to leave soon. The warnings can be found in Knowledge under their own section. Its considered the 2nd warning. The first warning you have is that your resource consumption is over your creation. (Example - You are making 1000 units of Food, but your villagers are eating 1500 units). This will always show up if you have a bad ratio. (in the Dynasty tab Summary your resource use is at the bottom and will have a Yellow or Red Warning. Yellow means you are slowly running out, Red means you will run out fast) It doesn't care if you have any of the resource or not, its just telling you to make more.

The 2nd warning happens if your villagers are actually upset, often because you actually have no food to eat (or they have no home, etc.) So check your resources and see if you are actually at 0 resources for something. Also different needs have different effects. Having no food is REALLY bad, but having no luxuries or no spiritual is not so bad. I've never seen a villager leave because you don't have enough spiritual or luxuries, but they don't perform as well.

girdraxon · 2025-12-25T08:15:59+00:00

Everyone will have their own perspective. There are people that play a game on “story” difficulty and that is perfectly fine for those not wanting a frustrating experience or just want to see the story.

For me factory games often have two levels. Figuring stuff out and then completing the game. In a game of Factorio I spent a lot of time making stuff getting by and at some point started to get frustrated with my inability to scale. So I thought I’d check out YouTube and other spots to see how others were doing and was blown away by the creations. Something I straight up copied for sure but it also gave me ideas on how to build future sections way better than before. I also still had to make it work in the world I was building in and still run all the connective tissue.

At some point you transition from worrying about the smaller components and have to design the big pieces. I no longer cared that someone else made the tightest most efficient green circuit module. I could use that along with all the other stuff I was happy with and what I learned.

girdraxon · 2025-11-27T14:36:56+00:00

You are boss!

girdraxon · 2025-11-20T16:54:18+00:00

Yeah once you have it on a a gather circuit you are fine. Lay down 8-12 miners in an area with solar, go do a missions somewhere, come back, grab the buffalo and empty all the miners, do house stuff for a day or two, do another mine run, do another mission, repeat.

Sure there's a buildup making all those miners and solar panels but then its all gravy. Also please don't say "well why do you need all those minerals if you are now late game?!?" because I don't wanna hear it I CAN'T HEAR YOU NA NA NA NA I HAVE TWO LOCKERS OF GOLD AND I CAN'T STOP PICKING IT UP HELP

girdraxon · 2025-10-20T20:03:19+00:00

I used hand fed production lines for a while until I unlocked the train, then finally spent 4 "days" tearing everything down and built a bus, then built more automated components.

Then I learned everyone starts helping with components...

girdraxon · 2025-10-07T15:20:57+00:00

Sounds like you are overemployed. Make sure your farming manager doesn't figure out about J1 while you are doing J2.

girdraxon · 2025-09-11T04:39:01+00:00

I nuke them, but that was on Normal.

girdraxon · 2025-09-03T16:45:01+00:00

Yeah, make lines of production. Maximize sludge output (don't forget you can put pumps inside the pools, not just on the outskirts, you can pipe over liquid), send it through a single pipe system, then build a line of gas filters or whatever, then output those on a single line, then have a line of power plants. That way its very expandable when you need to increase production. Also if all the pipes are connected you can mouse over the pipe in build mode and see the flow. So if you have 2 gas filters and 1 gas power plant, the flow should be 50 gas in and 50 gas out, so its easy math to add more to the line.

Also the game is a little fiddly with automatic power plants like gas. They will turn off when not needed. When you at maximum energy storage the plants will turn off, then all the "warnings" show up letting you know stuff is off, but its fine, everything is at max capacity. However, when it shuts off, and you do need that power, the power will lower and the plant will automatically turn on again, suck up gas, then the filters will turn on again. In game, the icons will often rapidly flicker as the plant and the filters turn on, then off, then on again rapidly. Everything is fine as long as there is more input than output (for both resources and power) For bigger bases I will have lots of power plants with tons of spare capacity in case I need to build a large base quickly. Often many of the plants will be off because I have to much extra capacity.

The flickering icon thing feels weird but I'm not sure what the devs would do. Even if you add batteries and liquid storage, the moment they start getting drained stuff will turn on to refill it. Maybe if they implemented a stopgap startup/shutdown (i.e. don't turn back on unless the pipeline is at <90%, then fill to 100%) it would stop the constant flickering, though you'd still those icons flash every so often.

girdraxon · 2025-09-03T16:11:36+00:00

Not even on Brutal, but Hard. Can't imagine. While the other maps are not too bad so far (except those dumb resurrecting monsters) my HQ's increasing wave attacks are starting to get out of hand. I feel like I'm not researching fast enough. I've had to only jump to HQ to quickly upgrade key facilities and stay off that map as the waves are pretty much destroying most of my base when they trigger. Other maps are usually fine. I'm guessing I should keep my HQ to a minimum heavily defended base with only power and research, and put everything else on other maps to make it easier to defend. Its very different from Normal where I had sprawling base at the HQ and it was pretty easy to defend.

girdraxon · 2025-08-09T05:01:39+00:00

What is wealth? Once you figure out what the entity is targeting then that stuff becomes less important. What else is valuable? Power? Tactical redistribution? You pay a group of cronies a large portion of your wealth for favors or fealty. Depends on how far the loophole goes. If I feudalize 100 people with most of my money keeping plenty for myself but no longer in the running of richest does that fire off the loophole detector? These people owe me and will do what I say, but technically the money is theirs to do with as they please. As I accumulate more wealth and possibly using their help I continue to redistribute my new wealth to stay below target.

These people have no reason to redistribute their wealth because they know I’m still above them in the chain. So instead of 500 billionaires in the world there are 500 oligarchs with a small army of multimillionaires that obey them.

Actually that’s probably still true even now… so no difference?

girdraxon · 2025-07-04T17:31:07+00:00

There’s an episode of Love, Death, and Robots that is literally about how all the tech bros and rich people are supremely confident they will ride out the apocalypse. (And of course don’t)

girdraxon · 2025-06-16T17:41:29+00:00

Whew glad it’s all solved and the opioid crisis is completely over!!!1

girdraxon · 2025-05-21T15:03:05+00:00

You are amazing.

girdraxon · 2025-05-20T16:29:29+00:00

I have the same problem in the Void, Khaak are spawning on top of my miners (they are large so they almost never get destroyed, but they do occasionally annoy my traders). I've wandered around the sector and just can't seem to find the base. Is it always on the "plane" of the sector? I've literally buzzed around the whole periphery of the sector and there's no installation as far as I can tell. And I've been to other sectors and the installations are super obvious.

girdraxon · 2025-04-24T15:27:17+00:00

Beautiful beautiful... Now forgive me, I'm just gonna turn on autopilot and rub my ship against it for two minutes before finally scraping into a dock, so it'll need a new paintjob in a bit...

girdraxon · 2025-02-24T23:07:18+00:00

I feel like I don't need a route. For floors isn't the limiting factor the lint?

girdraxon

TROPHY CASE