by Felkin » Sun Jan 12, 2014 9:40 pm Hello, fresh players and old veterans, today I will be teaching (or in veteran cases reminding, tho you might learn someting new!) how to peform one of the most crucial tasks when developing your infastructure – Planning a Plot!.
Firstly who am I to tell you how to make effective plots?
Well I‘ve been playing since W4 and in every single world I was the one doing all the main planning when it came to personal infastructure. I rarely join big villages, when I do, they‘re already developed or consist of small plots, thats where village planning comes into play, but thats easy as heck. Every time I make a plot I try to improve my designs. Make them nicer looking and more efficient(keyword right there!). So yea, I got enough experience to know a thing or 2.
Let‘s get on with it, shall we?
The guide will be divided into 3 main parts - base requirements, output calculation and layout planning. If you feel you're experienced in a field, skip it, I think my guide's strong point is the layout part, the first 2 being fillers for the new players.
Base requirements of any plot ~~~
So before you start planning a plot, you need to do some information sorting. Find out exactly what you WANT in a plot and what you NEED in a plot. Here is a list I always look at in the early stages of planning :
Must :
-Storage
-Crop farming area
-Tree farming area
-Smithery
-Crafting area
-Roads
-Animal Pens
-Free space for cheese trays, herbalist tables, boats, drying racks.
Then I look into some extra touches I want :
-Well locations
-Specific paving (red/yellow bricks are op)
-Decorative areas ( a garden?)
-Feasting stations ( if you want a nice one, some people just make one at the 2nd floor of a mansion or something, booooooring).
-A silk area (silk takes a lot of time, some people prefer to buy their silk goods)
You must think of what YOUR plot needs, you might be buying some specific commodities and won't have to bother with it, maybe your plot should be fancy looking, always take that into account when planning, make sure youre not missing any important industrial areas, your plot has to work as a single unit of production, it's a chain where stuff shouldn't be left behind.
Required output of a plot calculation ~~~
Now that you know what you want, you need to start thinking more specificaly – NUMBERS (rawwwrrr)
Every single area (I seperate all the Must points into areas) have a specific size it will take, specific other areas that it has to interact with, specific output and input it requires.
This part is where people start to make the most mistakes. It involves weighting benefits and game knowledge pretty much.
Firstly you need to know how much you are going to consume.
There are 4 things that a plot can output :
-Curiosities
-Food
-Consumables (wine, beer, tea, etc
-Gear
You need to look at these things and at the AMOUNT of people you are supplying with them.
For example take my plot :
We got 2 people. Me and my friend. We got 4 hearthlings total.
1 does farming and cooking and leather/silk work, 1 does smelting and carpentry, 1 does mining/meele fighting and the last 1 does foraging,ranged combat.
We look into what they need :
-All need curios. So thats 4 people to supply curiosities.
-1 needs leather/silk gear, the other smelted gear.
-All need food. We look into specifics :
-Miner needs str/con mostly.
-Ranger needs Per/Agi
-Industrial crafter – Dex/Psy/Str for the metalwork/jewelry
-Natural crafter – Dex/Psy
-Also all need some starting Int and some cons/ua to not get bashed too hard if something bad happened (Snipers etc).
-Everyone needs wine, tea and possibly some beer.
-Crafters need a set of tools, you either make em yourself or buy em.
So looking at the whole list we can see what we need in our plot the most and what not so much :
-A fair bit of curios
-A bit of every kind of food. Can see mostly Dex/Psy/Str so we intantly look at cheese and pie productions as our main food sources.
-Tools/gear will require a bit of metalwork. + to smithery size.
So now we know what kind of output we need from our plot. Then we look at sizes.
-Big pie requirement will ask for more than 1 oven – we plan ahead 3-4 ovens.
-In correlation with that we look into a bigger farm. Carrots/peas/poppies and wheat should make up the bigger parts of the farm.
-Tons of cheese consumption means a fair bit of wood and milk requirement. We look into a bigger tree farm,cows.
-Curios will require a lot of metalwork and farming. We must think about volva staffs,tin soldiers, steeds, arcabuses and straw dolls/seer leaves. Big ++ to tealeaves and metalwork.
So by looking at our needs we got a very good picture of what exactly we must produce and what will be more important than the other.
Every plot planner should look at what his villagers need from it and what will be more dominant in the grand sceme of things. Some areas will be bigger than others, all depends on what the villagers need. If you feel you need a lot of metal - you must always think of bigger tree farms, want more pies - bigger farms and so on. Having a good feel of the size of the areas is important.
Now comes the most CREATIVE part of the process – actual planning!
Planning the layout ~~~
When planning the layout of a plot there is only 1 single factor that comes into play : EFFICIENCY.
A plot consists of multiple areas and those areas have to be put in specific locations for 1 main reason - travel time. This is one of the main points of any living space - having everything at hand's reach, security,comfort and storage.
Another factor that some villages take into consideration and some don't is the overall look of the plot - make it look good. I emphasize this point a lot, cause it makes the repetitive every day actions in a plot a lot more enjoyable, + surprise your traders quite a bit hahahaha.
I will talk about 3 main parts of a succesful layout - chains, roads and centralization.
Chains
To plan your plot efficiently you must look at all the industrial CHAINS that make your raw goods into yummy food or toughtful curios.
Here are the main industrial paths :
What you must note is that im listing AREAS, parts of the chain that take up more than a few tiles of space. Things like brewing and drying usually take much less space and so should just be kept in mind as something to save some space for.
Now when you know the main industrial chain, you want to lay out the areas so that they are very close by. For example a tree farm should aways be close to the smithery. This will allow wood to be moved faster. Same way the cheese area should be close to animal pens to be able to fill the tubs with milk without much walking.
Roads
Every plot should have some roads, they allow easier transportation between areas, help the villagers always be on running speed without losing stamina, make the village look nicer.
What is important to know is to not over do it. There should not be too many paths, because then youre spending a lot of time running between areas, there should be a few main roads for cart moving, temporary storage placement. A balance is important
Centralization
This is a very key part - your most visited areas should be located closer to the center, while the main hub - curio/food/misc storage location should be at the very center, near the village idol if you got one. This is ofcourse to reduce travel time even further. I do not however suggest placing storage areas of more raw good at the center. They should be next to the working areas, depending on how many materials pass by em.
Why place all the metals at the center when the anvils are way back at the smithery? Uneeded walking. Only the stuff EVERY villager needs should be at the center. Your farmer will not have any use of bones, why keep em at the center hub then? Put em at a crafting area further back. Keep only the main stuff at hand's reach.
Following all of these points - here is how our own little plot looks like on paper -
Here is another screenshot of it, that shows how the chains play out to make the plot very efficient -
Bonus - making a village "feel" good
The last point I wanted to talk about would be the style. Most villages in haven are very generic and dont look too nice. The furthest people go into making their village look better is paving. Our village takes big advantage of paving to give the village a cozy look. The roads are made out of stone while all the areas are made out of red/yellow brick to make it feel warm and cozy.
A big mistake sometimes done with paving red/yellow is zigzags - don't do them. They provide a lot of visual noice that eventualy become very annoying and hurts the eyes. Going in blocks is usually the better way.
A garden area usually looks amazing in any plot, gives it a town'like feel, which is very good. Adding small decorations, like a fenced in tree with flax/poppies planted around it looks exceptionaly well.
The last point about style is space.
A village with less empty tiles feels a lot warmer than a village with tons of free space. You should manage your space distribution to have as least free tiles as possible, without hindering movement ofcourse. Our crafting area is going to be full of stuff, chests and decorative items will fill empty corners, etc. It can almost look like a junkyard, but not too random with the placement. Shift+right click to place on tiles with Enders is godbless. The more stuff, the better
So thank you for bearing with me and reading my guide to villa.... PLOT (almost got me there!) planning. I hope you learned SOMETHING nice in it and we will see more villages, plots that are nice to look like and dont look like frigging factories.
I will upload an image of our own plot in a few days, just started building it a few days ago, 70% done :3
P.S - I am known to be a huge derp and wrote this in 1h so mistakes are gona be made, remind me if I missed something important
Smell of Arrogance