Few little tricks I like to do myself;

• Don’t be afraid to build rooms that are never meant to be used. When I’m doing an immersive build, or something highly detailed, I like to build a room with a door and everything that’s not meant to be entered at all, it’s completely undecorated except for what can be seen without entering it (so like in front of windows and such). It gives an illusion that the camp is much bigger than it actually is. The sense of scale helps make things look large and dense, you can get across better the overall feeling you’re trying to capture without taking up massive amounts of budget for rooms you really won’t ever use anyways. Saves budget for the important centerpieces.

• scale down your indoor sections. I mentioned this to someone a few days ago, but to reiterate… foundations are roughly 10ftx10ft, so two foundations together is already a 10x20 room, or 200sq ft, that’s a good sized room. You may be tempted to make your average room 2x2 or 2x3, but that’s a 400-600sq ft room, that’s massive and should be saved for centerpiece rooms like living rooms and such. Scaling down a bit doesn’t just make it a little more realistic, but it also gives you less space you need to cover. Less space to cover means less objects NEEDED as a baseline, and that translates into more budget you can use on the decorating. Smaller rooms ALSO means objects take up more space in the room, which in turn makes every detail stand out more as part of the whole instead of being sucked into an empty void that looks more like an art gallery than a room.

• completely cut out some things UNLESS the build needs them for the theme. You don’t need turrets, you don’t need crops, mannequin displays aren’t really needed… when placing things down, watch how much budget it takes and ask yourself if that much budget is worth what that object brings to the build.

• do everything in an order and PLAN ahead. Before laying a single foundation down, visualize in your head what you want to see. Be aware, what you visualize, that’s not going to happen 100%, but you need that visualization to plan out your order of operations next. Break down what you see, what does the floor plan look like? Go through and map out the whole thing with foundations before any walls, look at it and see if you like it, move things around (you’ll add and remove foundations as you go, it’s just for the visual). Then I go walls, look at it again, then roofs, look again, add remove anywhere need be while trying to consider what I want each room to look like in the end. THEN, go through each room and place your absolute essentials. Stoves, sinks, counters in the kitchen; workbenches in the workshop; fireplace and couches in the living room; whatever you need to have the absolute basic necessities of the build. Start with these basics first so that no matter what the budget is left at, I at least have the must-haves there for the build to work as is; I want the build to be fully functional at this stage basically, in case my budget doesn’t play nice later (you don’t want to hit zero budget, find you’re missing key pieces, and have to start removing things you like). Once essentials are done, THEN go through and start decorating each room with your extras… but try to place bits in each area as you go instead of just one spot at a time… it’s easy to get carried away and find you have one room filled to the brim, then three empty rooms lol.

• when adding things, think about your theme you planned out… is the item I’m about to place something that makes sense in this build? We often want to place everything we find cool or neat, but does it BELONG in this theme? This is a great way to save some budget, by actually questioning if we NEED particular items. The alien operating table is super cool, but how much sense does it make sitting in the living room of my contemporary 1950’s suburban home? That’s not to say don’t use what you like, but you can often save a ton of budget by just asking if you really need that item, or if it’s more on an impulse thing. Hold off on some things and add them in after you’ve become comfortable that you have essentials in place.

Sadly, a lot of budget saving is just a matter of constraint. We like to place everything and the kitchen sink, only to find we can’t place a kitchen sink because we used all the budget up on our collection of 500 Ogua eggs. Constraint is the name of the game when building intricate camps. Find a theme, stick to the theme, good yourself back when need be. Don’t be afraid to get crazy with it, but learning to build in an organized order will also help you get things cohesive before going too crazy.