Dense housing grid tutorial

This guide will show you how to make very dense housing block.

Presentation

This guide will explain how to build houses that are very close to each other, even closer than using the square brush and painting minimal sized zones. At the end it will look like this :

Preparation

First of, you need a pristine area. For villager to place down a house, they need 3 things :

• The painted area needs to be big enough
  
• There must be no path or dirt present
  
• There need to be a need for house at that location

We will use the forbid brush, paint a zone big enough to fit all the houses you want.

Next to that location, you can build lot of gathering hut, this will create demand for housing in that area. I found out that helps a lot.

To paint a perfect square, you can use the square brush and the WASD keys

Size 12 brush

The minimal size for a house to be placed in a zone is a size 12 brush. From the smallest square brush available, you need to increase its size 11 times with CTRL + mouse wheel

Building the grid

Now we can start building the grid. Use the forbid brush of size 12 to allow a square, then paint a house zone in its place


As you can see, someone is going to place the house even without having access to it. If the house is not placed within 30 seconds of making the zone, there is probably something wrong (see the 3 rules above). Don't allow anything until all the houses are placed.

After the first house is placed, you are going to paint the next house but the brush will overlap, this will take some practice but I found the smallest possible zone is where the brush limit touch the "end" of the house that has been placed.


Slowly, houses are placed one by one.


If you want to see the houses before building, you can use the building tool to see houses as ghosts.

Finishing touch

There is nothing much more to it, now you can allow villagers to build houses. Later, you will be able to place buildings and decoration between houses to save even more space ! But they need to build everything to dense housing before you place something, or the house might disappear

I added 1 city watchtower and 2 patrol tower with 1 guard each for this square of 9 houses.


You can add watchtowers, decoration, wells or even market between houses for ultra efficiency !


The end.

[underworld]

You can also erase the extra housing zone once the house spawns in, I found this is easier than guessing with the overlap method. Once you place a size 12 housing zone and the house spawns in, hold right-click with the house zoning tool along the edge of the plot that just spawned, until you get the icon saying the house is about to be destroyed. then just re-zone enough for the icon to go away. you can do this along any edge next to which you want another house. then just repeat this process one by one with each house until you have the size neighborhood you want!

[[BLK] Telu]

Great guide, nice trick !

[Ficjusz]

What? A square brush? How to use it? I have only the circular one...

[Vesper]

Awesome guide, super useful! This makes creating light fortification sooo much easier! Thank you!

[何]

i think you forbid the area to keep em from making paths again.

[Manserk]

@Riddict_DK I did not make a video, I don't think my PC is strong enough to make one. I can try with steam recorder but no promises

[Riddick_DK]

Is there a video tutorial of this? i tried several times to replicate this, but i struggle to honestly figure it out >.< i suck, i know, but would appreciate a video guide if possible

[Valck]

I'm not into min-maxing, but I definitely like the looks - perfect for an inner city area where a little clipping can pass unnoticed anyway; not so much for a rural farming area of course.
Thanks for the inspiration!

[Manserk]

прохладный 👍

[kirill-lemov]

Очень правильно- я долго к этому приходил, а здесь чётко расписано!