How Zones Work
Zone tools let you paint rectangular areas of the map. The painted cells then carry special behaviours for citizens, buildings, or the forest. Zones are persistent — they save with your game and remain active until you unpaint them.
All three zone tools appear in the Build menu alongside other tools. Use the same Cancel paint tool to erase zone markings.
Reforestation Zone
Paint cells where you want trees to naturally re-seed over time. The forest's re-seeding logic prioritises marked cells when finding new growth targets. This is useful for:
- Recovering land you've deforested for lumber
- Maintaining a long-term managed woodland for foragers and hunters
- Filling in gaps in the forest without manual intervention
Reforestation is patient — trees take time to grow. Mark the area and let nature do the work.
Priority Haul Zone
Paint cells containing ground items — dropped resources, fallen timber, harvested crops — that you want collected before anything else. Idle citizens prioritise picking up items from within the Priority Haul zone over items elsewhere on the map.
Useful when:
- You've felled a large section of forest and want the logs cleared quickly
- A harvest dropped a lot of grain near a distant farm that's not getting collected fast enough
- You want to focus labour on a specific area temporarily
Quiet Zone
The Quiet Zone is the most nuanced of the three. Paint cells you want to designate as peaceful — typically a chapel district, a residential area, or the land around the Great Hearth.
Residents whose homes overlap a Quiet Zone cell receive a permanent Peaceful Surroundings moodlet (+2 happiness).
However, if any loud industrial building has any part of its footprint inside the Quiet Zone, those same residents instead receive a Disturbed by Noise moodlet (−2 happiness), cancelling the benefit.
| Loud buildings (IsLoudBuilding) |
|---|
| Smithy, Sawmill, Brewery, Blacksmith, Brickworks, Charcoal Kiln, Mill, Quarry, Smelter, Tannery |
The Quiet Zone turns red in the overlay when a loud building is present inside it, giving you immediate visual feedback. The fix is simple: move the loud building outside the zone, or expand the zone to exclude that building's footprint.