These are by no means required, but these are the rules we used with our design team to simplify level creation. It focused on some basic ideas and rules we could all follow. The result was much faster level creation, and some consistency in our level designs.
Feel free to use these, create your own, or just feel it out with each City Plan, the code will support whatever approach you want to take!
These were all part of the City Planner's Toolkit for Sim Settlements 1, so if you are familiar with that - skip down to the Final Thoughts section!
- The final design, with all plots at level 3, everything wired up, navmesh tested, lots of animation markers, guard patrol routes, attack markers placed, a City Planner's Desk, Recruitment Beacon, and a night-time lighting pass.
- Remove Colorful Items: Paintings, Posters, Carpets, Awnings, etc.
- Reduce Clutter Piles: Any large sections of clutter such as store rooms or hand-built shops should be reduced by a good amount.
- Remove Luxury Items: TV’s, Radios, Plants, Sitting Areas for relaxing
- Remove Stand-out Set Pieces: These should be removed or reduced in size/complexity, possibly even broken down into parts and arranged as if the settlers are working on building them.
- Reduce the Size of Large Structures: Look for opportunities to remove large sections or rooms so it becomes a smaller/simplified version.
- Simplify Defenses: Reduce the level of turrets, make the walls less imposing.
- Reduce Utilities: Remove or downgrade some of the power and water generators.
- Reduce Lighting: Cut down the lighting by about 30% if you used a lot of lights.
- Change Clutter: Rearrange or change out clutter you find hand-placed on counters and shelves.
- Remove Most Lights: Lighting should be very minimal, maybe a third of what it is at level 3. Leave lower tech lighting such as oil lamps and candles, and only a small amount of electric lights.
- Further Reduce Clutter Piles: Large clutter sections should be dropped down to a smaller amount, maybe 20-30% of what they were at L3.
- Further Reduce Large Structures: Simplify hand-built structures further, eliminating wings or sections.
- Minimize Defenses: Walls should look very ram-shackle and may even have some unblocked areas. Just a few low level turrets should remain, if any.
- Add Construction Materials: Add piles of building materials throughout the settlement, especially near the structures you reduced or removed.
- Change Clutter: Rearrange or change out clutter you find hand-placed on counters and shelves.
- Replace Lazy Blue Men: Stick with working blue men markers as opposed to lazy. Those reading newspapers should especially be removed as it’s much too advanced an activity for a fledgling settlement.
- Remove Some Crafting Stations: If there’s an area with multiple, remove some of them.
- Remove or Replace Doors: Simplify or remove doors, colorful and strong doors should be reserved for level 2 and 3.
- Downgrade Furniture: Any fancy looking furniture (couches, chairs, ornate tables, etc) should be replaced with dirty or broken versions.
- Remove Whole Glass: Replace with broken glass equivalent or another material entirely.
The goal of Level 0 is to only leave the bare minimum amount of pathing objects and structural supports for the plots and other assignable objects to be reachable.
- Remove Furniture: Any furniture such as random chairs, tables, and desks should be removed (excluding the City Planner’s Desk).
- Remove Lights: All lighting should be removed.
- Remove Power: All conduits, connectors, wires, generators, and anything else power related should be removed. The exception would be a Recruitment Beacon and small power source.
- Handle Interior Plot Buildings: Buildings with Interior Plots should be reduced to frames, only the floor and the wall the fusebox side is against should remain. You can also add in basic supports where the walls once where on the first story if the structure looks unsafe. For Residential Interiors, also leave the roof.
- Reduce Flooring: Any excess flooring that makes paths to places should be removed unless it is necessary for NPCs to reach a plot or assignable object.
- Remove most structures that aren’t supporting plots you want to exist early.
- Minimize Water: Only the simplest hand-water pumps should remain, and only a few of them.
- Remove all Clutter: Anything that isn’t part of a structure should be gone at this point.
- Remove Non Load-Bearing Walls: If you can remove a wall and replace it with a post and it still looks stable, do so.
- Remove Railings: Handrails on stairs and walkways can all go.
Remember, these were just our internal guidelines used in SS1 City Plan design. You don't have to follow these at all - they are just a helpful starting point.
Obviously some things have changed with SS2 that might invalidate some of the ideas, for example, it's much easier to have all ratings covered by SS2 now, so a lot of the talk about generators, turrets, and water producers probably doesn't apply if you are using a lot of plots for those things in your design.
What I do recommend you do differently in SS2, is to manually set all of your plot levels using console commands in each level. SS2 can actually upgrade plots when the City Plan upgrades! So if the player has that feature enabled (Gameplay Options > City Building > Starting Plot Levels), the can end up with higher level plots immediately.
You can use the console command cqf SS2_PlotManager X Y to change the level of all plots (replace X with the reference ID you get at the top of your console when you click on the settlement workbench, and Y with the level), or use the below command on plots to upgrade/downgrade them individually:
cf forcePlotLevel X -1
Replacing X with the desired level.
Ideally you'd set the plot levels as follows:
-
Level 0 Save: All plots to level 1.
-
Level 1 Save: Some plots to level 2, your choice how many, and which. The idea is simply to give a sense of progression so that the plots don't appear to have not reacted at all to the upgrade.
The normal SS2 rules are still in play when a City Plan is used, so a plot could have upgraded already. Setting some of them to level 2 here is sort of a back-up plan to ensure that some upgrade in the case the settlement hasn't reached the criteria to upgrade any plots naturally.