Construction & Building

Nothing is built instantly. Citizens carry materials, clear the land, and raise every structure by hand.

Placing a Building

Select a building from the Build menu, then click to place it. Most buildings drop with a single click; roads are painted by dragging, and area buildings (farms, orchards, vineyards, pastures, stockpiles) are placed by clicking 4 corners to outline the area. A ghost preview shows the building in green if the placement is valid, or red if something is in the way.

While placing, use the mouse wheel to rotate the building continuously to any angle — for an organic tilted look that avoids the rigid grid feel. Press Tab to snap to the nearest 45° cardinal orientation (eight in total, including diagonal). Press F to flip the building horizontally. Combined, that gives enormous variety in how a settlement can look. Most buildings support both rotation and mirroring; a few landmark structures (like the Town Hall) can't be mirrored.

When you confirm placement, a construction site appears instead of the finished building. The real building only materialises once all required materials have been delivered.

The Construction Process

Construction happens in two phases:

Phase 1: Land clearing

If the building's footprint overlaps any trees or surface stones, those are automatically marked for removal. Citizens use their existing chopping and gathering skills to clear them. Material delivery doesn't begin until the land is fully clear.

Phase 2: Material delivery

Once the land is clear, idle citizens begin fetching the required materials from barns and delivering them to the site. Each citizen can only carry a limited amount at a time, so a large building requires multiple trips. When the last material arrives, the building spawns.

Tip: Click any construction site to open its panel. You can see which materials have been delivered, which are still needed, and cancel the build if plans change. Cancelling returns all delivered materials as ground items.

Common Build Costs

Build costs vary by building type and upgrade tier. As a rough guide, expect wood-framed buildings to cost mostly logs and planks, stone buildings to require quarried stone, and brick buildings to need fired bricks in addition. Advanced workshops often also require iron.

Having a good stockpile of planks, stone, and iron ore before expanding rapidly will keep construction moving without bottlenecks. The Sawmill is the most important early building for this reason — it converts raw logs into planks that nearly every structure needs.

Roads

Villagers move faster on roads. Building a road network through your settlement directly improves how quickly materials get delivered, crops get harvested, and citizens reach their workplaces.

Two road types are available:

Roads are placed by dragging a path, not by constructing individual tiles. The game renders them as narrow, worn-looking paths that meander slightly and fade into the grass at their endpoints — they curve naturally around bends and look like paths that have been walked into existence rather than laid down by engineers.

Tip: Road speed bonuses stack with edict speed bonuses. If you've passed movement edicts, a fully paved settlement becomes noticeably faster than an unroaded one — the effect compounds.

Building Upgrades

Some buildings can be upgraded to a more advanced form. Upgrading replaces the building in-place on the same footprint — workers and residents don't need to move out, and the building remains functional throughout the upgrade process.

Examples: a basic House can be upgraded to a Stone House, then a Brick House. The Great Hearth can be upgraded through four tiers, all sharing the same 3×3 footprint.

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