Cluster your buildings into villages and wear paths between them.
Settlements & Roads
Structure prefabs give a generated world buildings, but deliberately spread-out ones — the placement rules push them apart so they never pile up. That is right for a lone watchtower and wrong for everywhere anyone actually lives.
A settlement is the opposite instruction. It picks a spot, relaxes the spacing rule inside its own circle, fills it from a pool of prefabs you name, and wears paths between the doors.
Where to Author It
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Draw the buildings | Zones → New Map, one map per building |
| Mark each as a prefab | Zones → right-click the map → Structure Prefab… |
| Build the settlement | Zones → open a map → World Gen → Settlements… |
| See it appear | World Gen → Generate |
Setting One Up
1. Make the buildings first. A settlement is assembled from structure prefabs, so each building has to be a map you have already marked. See Structure Prefabs. 2. Open World Gen → Settlements… and click New settlement. 3. Name it and save. The name becomes its id. 4. Add its buildings. Each one gets a weight, and optionally a floor and a ceiling on how many appear. 5. Star one as the centrepiece. It stands dead centre and the roads run out from it — a well, a village green, a market cross. Only one is honoured. 6. Pick a road tileset if you want streets. Any ground tileset works; a dirt-path autotile looks the part. 7. Add biomes if you want it restricted. An empty biome list means anywhere walkable. 8. Generate a large map.
The Fields
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Found these when generating | Turns the settlement on and off without losing its setup. |
| Buildings — fewest / most | How many buildings it holds. Rolled per settlement, so two villages of the same kind are not the same size. |
| Radius | How far from the middle its buildings may stand. This is its shape; the building count is its size. |
| Gap between its buildings | Replaces each prefab's own spacing inside the settlement. A cottage that wants twelve tiles of isolation out in the wilds takes two from its neighbour on a village street — that relaxation is the whole point. |
| Gap to the next settlement | Measured edge to edge, radius included. Two villages a screen apart read as one sprawl rather than as two places. |
| How often it is chosen | Relative weight against the other settlements eligible on the same ground. |
| Road tileset | The ground tileset the paths are drawn with. Leave it empty and the buildings still cluster — they are just not joined up. |
| Road width | How many tiles across. A road narrows rather than paving a pond it cannot fit past. |
| Run a road out to the nearest settlement | Draws the highways between settlements, separately from the streets inside them. A hamlet can have paths between its own houses without a road to the next valley. |
| Buildings it is made of | The prefab pool. At least guarantees copies (set 1 on your well and every village has one); at most caps them; weight decides how the remaining slots are filled. |
| Biomes it may be founded in | Which biomes, with a weight per biome. Empty means anywhere walkable. |
How the Roads Are Laid
Streets run from each building to the settlement's heart, which is what makes a village read as one place rather than a cluster of separate houses. Highways run between settlements, one per pair.
Paths route around water — bridging is a prefab's job, not the pathfinder's — and around buildings, except for the doorstep they are arriving at. Climbing costs a road more than going around, so a path follows the contours the way a worn one does rather than charging straight up a hillside.
Gotchas
> Make the prefabs first. A settlement cannot use a map that is not already a structure prefab, and the editor will say so rather than accepting it and placing nothing.
> A settlement with no buildings is never founded. It would claim ground, place nothing and look exactly like the generator skipping it, so it is dropped instead. The editor warns when the list is empty.
> Building count is authored, not emergent. Left to the radius and the spacing alone, a "hamlet" with a generous radius quietly fills with thirty houses and becomes a town — and shrinking the radius would be your only lever, which changes its shape rather than its size.
> Only one centrepiece. Starring a new one un-stars the old.
> Roads match the ground they are drawn on. On a blended map the road becomes a terrain layer with soft edges; on an autotiled map it becomes the floor with crisp ones. You do not have to do anything — but it does mean a road tileset that only looks right as one of the two will only look right on that kind of map.
> Removing the last biome means "anywhere", not "nowhere".
> Lone buildings keep out. Ground a settlement has claimed is off limits to the scattered structure pass, so a shack never lands on the village green.
> Studio or Enterprise tier, like the rest of map generation.