Someone teach me how to properly use fences/forbid tool.

[Gangrene]

TLDR: Just want my town to look nice, would like a method of using the fences and forbid tools to make a neater looking town.

Been enjoying the game quite a lot, on town attempt #4, learning a bit more each time, planning better and more efficiently. However I kinda have a "problem" in that my town looks kinda...hideous.
The residential areas are just all over the place. I read in another thread that the fences and forbid area tools are great for setting up a nicer looking town with roads that look a little more...planned? Just wondering if someone with more experience than I would share a trick or 2 when using these tools and setting up their town. Do you just do smaller districts for housing? Or one huge area that expands over time? Should I lay down my fences first, or let the houses set up and THEN fence them in? How do you all set up industry, with fences also, or just let the buildings hang out near the resources? Would love to get some feedback from other players. Screenshots always welcome.

[plaYer2k]

I seccond this request.

I occasionally play since 2019 and yet that is something that changed a lot over the last 1-2 years it feels and thus I feel like an absolute noob too :)
My residential areas are so sparsely populated that I often just place buildings inbetween them to make use of the like 70% unused space.

Then however, I saw screenshots of other people where residential buildings clip into each other with how close they are and I simply can not understand how. So their methods seem like 3 times as densely packed, if not more.

[Redphoenix]

If you want a tight housing structure, dont paint big areas at once. Select a smaller brush and then just add a bit of area until a house is to be build, then the next bit.

If you offer too much area they will just plonk the houses somewhere and leave a metric fkton of upen space between each others houses.

[Engioc]

At the start of the game/city, you can use fences as guides for where you want paths/roads to be. You can place the fence, but don't hit the "Build" button. Instead, hit the "X" button to close the window. You'll still see the fence, but its not set in stone because you didn't hit build. Do that on each side of where you want the path to be, now you have a guide that helps work out where to place buildings along the sides of the path.

Also, make sure you use the tools to set each node along the fence to the desired type, straight or curved (select one of the white posts/nodes, you will see buttons above that to decide if it should be a curved node, or straight node).

If you want to delete a section of fence to make space for a gate, instead of clicking on the node like before, this time click on the fence between two nodes, hit the shovel icon, that section of fence will be removed. I have a few screenshots I've posted here, so I won't post them again now, but if you want an idea of what I'm talking about you can always check them out in my steam profile.