Before we can get into how these classes work, it's necessary to discuss some of the ideas that went into the design of Sim Settlements 2. This will help you understand our reasoning, and make sure your buildings enhance and further this vision, rather than unintentionally fighting against it.
After that, we'll go over how you can set up your buildings to produce specific resources, and how the formulas work for those.
In Sim Settlements 2, Industrial becomes one of the most important plot types. The addition of costs for building, upgrade, and City Plans, means that players will either have to constantly provide resources from their inventory - or design an Industrial chain to meet those needs.
Obviously, given the name of this mod, we want them to lean more towards the latter, but have given the tools to go either way (or a mix).
If you played through our main quest, you know how long we leave the player with access to only a few plot types. This was intentional to really sell the importance of these types in settlement designs. Since agricultural plots would quickly meet food needs, this meant that the majority of a player's early jobs would be Industrial, so they would quickly unlock the various classes and build up a strong surplus of resources.
The goal here is to create a subtle tech tree through the mod, whereby more complex and valuable plot types are gated behind certain resources. This should naturally encourage players to build more of the lower-tech cheaper things earlier, and limit them from going overboard on the niche buildings later on.
A word on balance:
The balance of this mod is going to be constantly evolving, so by no means do I believe it to be perfect. So if you're reading this section, and thinking that the balance you've seen in game does not reflect the vision I'm describing, then it means we have work to do on the balance.
My approach to gameplay design is always to lay out the philosophy of what we're trying to accomplish, and the feeling and experience we want to provide the player, and manipulate the numbers to match.
As we receive more feedback, and tinker with mechanics, we will be revisisting the numbers many times, but always in service to the design ideas you're reading here.
Sim Settlements 2 has three levels of difficulty regarding costs, this is controlled with an option called Resource Complexity. This options are: Scrap, Scrap Categories, and Scrap Components. By default, the difficulty level you set your game to determines which of these modes Sim Settlements starts in.
Scrap: The easiest difficulty treats every scrap item interchangeably, this setting is designed for people who have no interest in resource management, but would at least like to have Industrial be a required part of their designs.
Scrap Categories: This is the moderate difficulty, the default setting for the majority of players, and was the basis for our original design pattern of Industrial in SS2. With this, the vanilla scrap components are divided into 4 categories: Building Materials, Organic Materials, Machine Parts, and Rare Materials. These categories are also the first Industrial Classes that are unlocked.
These categories are treated as resource pools for many of our costs. You can think of them similar to how an RTS game, such as Age of Empires, might have a variety of harvestable resources.
Scrap Components: This is the hardcore difficulty, which is enabled for Survival players by default (due to timing of scripts, this sometimes does not auto-enable and may require the player to manually enable it even when in Suvival). It takes each of those categories and further breaks them down into their individual components, meaning the settlement will need specific amounts of a variety of scrap items. This is designed to be an extreme management challenge for players who are looking to add layers and layers of depth to their game.
For the most part, we balanced our numbers and the order of our categories, based on the rarity of those in-game components. With the categories having a sort of order from most common materials to least common materials. So in general, the player will have far more Building Materials than they do Organic Materials, which will be more plentiful than Machine Parts, and Rare Materials will operate with the smallest numbers.
This gives an implicit feel of understanding the value of each item to the player. We tried to reflect this in our UI, by stacking them in this order, and in our costs by using numbers that are weighed based on the relative appearance and value of the corresponding categories. So that costs will always have a much higher Building Materials cost in raw numbers than the other types, such as Machine Parts, for example.
Generally, users in the first two groups will have minimal trouble maintaining the resources needed to build their settlements. The third group will be constantly running out of things and searching for ways to optimize their production (which is the exact feeling we want). Helping to optimize the production, is where the Conversion class comes into play.
The path of Industrial is designed so that as you go further into it, you gain finer control over the resources generated. At the start, you only have access to Junk Gathering, which creates fully random junk items which can be scrapped into a variety of components. Then each of the 4 categories has its own class to specifically generate that resource type and for players using the Component complexity, a relatively ratioed amount of the components within the category.
That word salad means that within the categories, we tried to maintain the relative balance that Bethesda put into the base game for the amount of each component produced. So that Wood will use higher numbers than something else in the category that is less common, such as Asbestos. Ex. For every 100 Wood generated, you would only generate about 40 Asbestos.
Costs factor these things in as well, so that when a cost exceeds a normal ratio, it is done as a throttle to try and push the player to either invest more into gathering that resource type, or to choose buildings that don't require so much of it.
So when we get to Conversion, the goal is to allow the player to convert their excess resources of one type into another. So you start at fully random at the base of industrial and work your way towards specific individual item creation. Obviously, this is most valuable to players using Component level complexity - which is likely the only group of players who will even care we went to all this trouble in the first place! (For everyone else, these buildings largely act as flavor and will only result in a small net-gain of resources)
It's now necessary to step out from talk of resources and Industrial to put both Conversion and Production (which we haven't talked about yet) into perspective.
The design of Sim Settlements 2 has always been about Empire Building. You are not rebuilding Sanctuary Hills, you are rebuilding the Commonwealth.
With that in mind, we don't expect players to be able to have fully balanced individual settlements. The engine creates this limitation for us (by crashing when too many objects and NPCs exist in an area - and that has led to players creating themselves internal limits on how much they will build up a place), and we've leaned into this to encourage focused settlements that can produce excesses and then share them with their neighboring settlements.
In the early game, they absolutely will be able to balance out a settlement, but as they get deeper into our "tech-tree" and unlock more elaborate building classes, it will become impractical, if not impossible, to avoid specializing. This is especially true for players who opt to engage in the full experience, with Maintenance and Operating Costs turned on.
The Importance of Maintenance and Operating Costs
The base game has a severe problem when it comes to balance in the settlement system that makes it very difficult to expand the system in meaningful ways. That is due to the Water, Power, and Defense providing objects having no limiter. Food was always fairly well balanced in that it required settlers to grow it. So there was a built-in limit on how much you could produce. In addition to this problem of uncapped resources, there was a problem of exponential growth. Once you managed to get a handful of settlements going, the surpluses they provided would spiral out of control and make you and your settlements incredibly wealthy to the point that the game economy became broken.
With Sim Settlements 2, we wanted to be sure that every resource was important, so that growing the settlement and making choices felt interesting and meaningful. To accomplish this, we introduced maintenance and operating costs. Though these systems are disabled for all but survival players by default, as they add a considerable challenge to the workshop system.
Maintenance costs put a daily material cost on Water, Defense, and Power producing objects, failure to pay these costs will start resulting in random failures of those items. This helps to solve the problem of unchecked resources, as additional industrial plots will have to be built to handle those costs, which means additional manpower is required, adding in the restraint we need to prevent unlimited growth.
Operating costs put a daily cost on certain plots, failure to pay these costs will shut the plot down for the day. This helps provide a resource sink to prevent the player and settlement from accumulating too much wealth, while simultaneously ensuring that Industrial always has a place even in the late game. (The commercial tie-in also helps, which we'll be discussing in the next section)
Both of these systems play a huge role in ensuring the player always has a role to play in the planning, and give Sim Settlements 2 a feel of interconnectedness that is severely lacking otherwise.
We recognized in development though, that many players are interested in SS2 for its automation capabilities, so these systems are disabled by default. I assume that you are reading this because you're interested in deeper settlement gameplay - so I highly advise you turn these on to get the full experience. It's brutally difficult, and requires a constant juggling of buildings, personal donations, and use of the beacon system to ensure your settlements stay afloat.
Once the player is in the late game, and they are focusing on individual resource production through the Conversion class with Component level complexity, each settler will be responsible for producing 1 or 2 individual components out of the 30+ total types. Not to mention, that over time, they will likely want multiples of some to produce a large surplus of the rarer materials for building some of the higher-end plots, it further reinforces the need to plan and play at an empire level.
So where does the Production class fit in, and how does it relate to Commercial?
If we had built this giant system, and all it did was self-sustain, players would start to feel like they were hamsters on a wheel without a reward to chase. Production is the final payoff, and Commercial is the delivery mechanism.
In Sim Settlements 1, immense amounts of produced items were dumped into the workbench, which not only would invalidate the need to play much of the rest of the game, but it didn't feel realistic either - it broke out of our simulated civilization we were creating. Why would these people who are scrambling to survive just give everything they created to the player?
Instead, with Sim Settlements 2, the Industrial Production class generates items for Commercial plots to sell. The player will then have a much larger pool of goods to choose from, and simultaneously a resource sink for the extreme amount of caps and other goods they will have acquired in the late game.
This way, the player is engaging in the economy they've helped the settlers create, rather than robbing them of their hard-earned goods. To further flesh out the feel of an economy, the Production class of industrial will spread its goods through the caravan system, starting with the local settlement shops, and spreading outward depositing goods across the Commercial shops of other connected settlements.
It feels even more rewarding and connected if you turn off the Shops Auto Restock option, which eliminates the vanilla mechanic by which shop keepers reset their inventory every 48 hours. With this off, each store gets one set of goods to start, and can only restock through Industrial production!
Since resources in Sim Settlements 2 are largely virtual from the player's perspective (ie. they can't claim any of the scrap components or caps the settlements show in the HUD), Commercial's role becomes clear as the method by which the player gets a personal reward for all of their planning. Even when the Tax Services kicks in, it's still tied to Commercial as Commercial Plots are the primary driver of settlement caps, from which the taxes are taken.
You can slot in your addon buildings anywhere you like. If you think they would make good baseline Junk Gathering, or one of the 4 subclasses, those are always going to be in high demand from players. Since they make up the bulk of early game play, and for players not playing at the highest complexity the Conversion Plots aren't particularly useful - those 5 types are perfect for most buildings if your goal is to ensure your designs are used frequently.
If you are interested in creating more specialized and unique uses for your building, either because you want it to stand alone, or because the art and flavor demand it - then Conversion and Production are going to be your friends, though they require a little bit more thought.
These are the 2 classes of plot that have no native production to them. If you choose these, your buildings provide no benefit to the player unless you explicitly define them.
To make things easier though, we handle all of the math for you at code level. All you have to think about is:
What is my building creating?
If your answer is some sort of scrap component, such Aluminum, Wood, Nuclear Material, Ballistic Fiber, etc - you should be creating a Conversion type. If your answer is some sort of item the player can use directly, such as ammo, weapons, armor, food, etc - you should be creating a Production type.
The second question you need to answer is:
What components do my settlers use to create these items?
For example, perhaps you want to convert Lead, Steel, Fertilizer into Frag Grenades. Or maybe you want to convert Circuitry into Copper and Plastic. Or maybe you want to approach it a different way, and use Caps as the resource cost as if the settlers are purchasing/trading for something.
Still another way to think about things, what if instead of them using the components to directly create items, what if the components represent the maintenance of the machinery that's producing the items.
Finally, if you still can't think of anything that makes sense for consumption, we have default consumption configured for both Conversion and Production in the form of Caps, which you can choose not to override, and only think about the production side of things!
Your answer may be "nothing". Perhaps you have a Brahmin plot and you want it to produce fertilizer and meat, and costing individual components doesn't make any sense - we'll discuss other ways you can handle that below in the Non-Traditional Production & Costs section.
Once you know the product you're creating, and the types of items that should be consumed in their production. You're ready to set up your building plan.
So you've decided your building is best suited for converting resources. It's a gear in the complex machinery of optimizing the settlement empire to get the perfect balance of resources! This type is very easy to set up, here's how you do it.
ProducedItems
This field is incredibly flexible. For the Conversion type, we're going to keep it very simple, we'll go into more of the options available under the Production Type section which also uses this field.
iCount: You have two ways to approach this: enter the number of the item you would like to produce. Or if you don't want to think about balance, set this to -1, which will make it so that the number of produced items is automatically calculated based on the amount of resources you decide to have your building consume each day.
iLevel: If you want to have the amount change as your plot levels up, you'll likely want a ProducedItems entry for each level, with this number increasing each time (ie. a ProducedItems entry with this set to 1, another with it set to 2, and a final with this set to 3).
Alternatively, if your plan is to use the iCount = -1 for automatic production calculation, you could instead set this iLevel field to -1, which tells SS2 to use this entry for every level of the plot. Then when you set up the consumption, you could have the consumption increase each level which would naturally cause the automatically calculated count to increase. For an example of this, check out our building plan: SS2_BuildingPlan_Ind_2x2_GlueFactory.
Item: Finally, we'll set up the actual item type to be produced. For this, you're going to choose ActorValue from the first drop-down box. This will cause a second drop-down to appear. From here you're going to filter for SS2_VirtualResourceDaily and select the component you are looking to produce.
Technically you can make the Conversion type produce whatever you like. It doesn't have to be these ActorValues, it can even do the exact same thing as Production. I prefer to give you unlimited freedom in case you have a creative idea you want to pursue that you believe fits well in the system.
I only ask that you consider player expectation. The reason for separating these two types, was so that without having to look into the specific numbers or details of a building, players can quickly understand that if they choose a Conversion or Production type they know roughly what they are getting. Ie. some sort of component(s) or some sort of commercial product, respectively. So you have the freedom, just be sure to keep the player's gameplay experience in mind!
OperatingCosts
We'll start simple with this for Conversion, and get into some of the other possibilities later in the document.
iCount: Unlike production, this has no fancy automated calculation, just enter the number this should consume daily. If you're uncertain where to start, look at some of the Industrial building plans from SS2 as inspiration.
iLevel: This works exactly the same as production. Either enter -1 to apply to all levels, or plan on creating an entry for each level 1, 2, and 3.
Item: Set this up the same way you did production, choosing ActorValue in the first dropdown, and the appropriate SS2_VirtualResourceDaily component in the second that appears.
This check box basically says, if checked - add my costs to the class costs, if unchecked, my costs should override the class costs.
We skipped several fields during Conversion coverage, and you likely started imagining what else you could have pulled off seeing as though these fields would let you select virtually anything, and we'll double-back to everything we skipped in a bit. The goal here was to show you how most Conversion class building plans should be set up.
You've determined your building is best suited to pump products into the economy. A part of the manufacturing chain that will bring the player their just rewards!
Production can be very simple to set up, or it can be extremely complex, it really depends on how crazy you want to get with the items you're producing. For now, I'm going to assume you have a relatively simple idea such as producing 1 particular item and we'll cover more advanced production under the Non-Traditional Production & Costs section.
ProducedItems
iCount: Similar to the Conversion class. You have two ways to approach this: enter the number of the item you would like to produce. Or if you don't want to think about balance, set this to -1, which will make it so that the number of produced items is automatically calculated based on the amount of resources you decide to have your building consume each day (for Production, this uses the Caps value of items being produced as part of the equation, so that you'll naturally see less production of higher cost goods unless you jack up the operating costs to compensate).
iLevel: Identical to Conversion class. If you want to have the amount change as your plot levels up, you'll likely want a ProducedItems entry for each level, with this number increasing each time (ie. a ProducedItems entry with this set to 1, another with it set to 2, and a final with this set to 3).
Alternatively, if your plan is to use the iCount = -1 for automatic production calculation, you could instead set this iLevel field to -1, which tells SS2 to use this entry for every level of the plot. Then when you set up the consumption, you could have the consumption increase each level which would naturally cause the automatically calculated count to increase. For an example of this, check out our building plan: SS2_BuildingPlan_Ind_2x2_GlueFactory.
iTargetVendorLevel: This determines the minimum level vendor that should receive this production in their inventory. IMPORTANT: Vendor level is setup as 0, 1, 2 instead of 1, 2, 3 (this was something done by Bethesda that we are inheriting). If you enter 0, then all Commercial Plots of the appropriate type will receive it, if you enter 1, only level 2 and 3 shops will receive it, and finally if you enter 2, only level 3 shops will receive it.
Item: For the Item, I'll recommend you keep it simple and enter only single specific items here, for example, a specific ammo, weapon, chem, armor piece, etc. Avoid things like FormLists or LeveledItems for now. If you want to produce more than one item type, create an additional ProducedItems entry for each.
(Note that if you provide multiple entries and use the -1 iCount trick to automate the math, the system will attempt to be intelligent and create a ratio of production based on the relative value of your items, so that the shops will receive more of the cheaper items. For example, if you enter a Minigun in one entry, and 5mm ammo in the other, SS2 will produce a large number of ammo, and likely only a single Minigun due to the extreme differences in cap values between the objects)
sTargetVendorType: This determines which shop type this item should be sent to. In the CK, the Documentation String below the entry box shows your available options from the base game and Sim Settlements 2. Or you can enter your custom vendor ID if you are injecting in to your own custom vendor type.
OperatingCosts
This is the exact same explanation as the Conversion class.
iCount: Unlike production, this has no fancy automated calculation, just enter the number this should consume daily. If you're uncertain where to start, look at some of the Industrial building plans from SS2 as inspiration.
iLevel: This works exactly the same as production. Either enter -1 to apply to all levels, or plan on creating an entry for each level 1, 2, and 3.
Item: Set this up the same way you did production, choosing ActorValue in the first dropdown, and the appropriate SS2_VirtualResourceDaily component in the second that appears.
This check box basically says, if checked - add my costs to the class costs, if unchecked, my costs should override the class costs.
If neither of the cost/production models described above felt right for your building, then perhaps some of the information here will help you create the perfect blend to match your facility.
First we'll go over the various fields we skipped above and discuss how they can be used to potentially pull off what you're looking for. Then we'll discuss how SettlementResources can act as indirect means of applying a cost to the production your building provides.
iOccupantCount: This is a special field for building plans that support multiple settlers. By setting this value in an entry, you can provide additional resources that are only produced when this many or more settlers are assigned to the plot.
Note that ALL production and operating costs are multiplied by the number of occupants. So only use this to create bonus items.
We multiply all production, consumption, and settlement resources provided by plots by the number of settlers to ensure that the balance is always tied to the number of people. This allows you as the building designer to have tons of creative freedom, without having to worry about balance.
Item: This wasn't skipped, but we're going to discuss how you can use FormLists and LeveledItems in this field. In both cases, you're going to also want to make use of the NameHolderForm field described below.
FormList: When using a formlist, items are produced at random from this list, with no specific weighting applied. It could randomly create all of one or the other, though over time, it is going to create the same amount of each on average. When using the iCount = -1 trick for calculation, this uses the average value of all items in the list, so this combination of formlist and iCount = -1 should generally only be used for items of similar value, or the production quantities could end up being quite low. (For example in our earlier example of a Minigun and 5mm ammo, the difference in value is nearly 300, which means the average would be 150, so whether it randomly chose the gun or bullet, each would be considered worth 150 for purposes of calculating quantity to create).
LeveledItem: When using a LeveledItem, the exact iCount of that LeveledItem will be created, you cannot use iCount = -1 with LeveledItems. LeveledItems offer a lot of flexibility and control for randomized item pools, but it's up to you to determine the value of them, so you'll need to put more care into the OperatingCosts versus the iCount value you land on for the LeveledItem.
NameHolderForm: This should be MiscItem record with the Name field filled out, this will then be used in any reports that displays the production to the player. It is mandatory when using a FormList or LeveledItem as the Item, but can optionally be used for any Item type as well if you want to override the default object name for some reason.
TargetContainerKeyword: Workshop Framework includes a little known system whereby special containers can be created for rerouting workshop item production to those containers automatically. At the time of this writing, no one has made a mod capitalizing on this system, but the idea of this field is that if you opted to not set the two vendor fields, the items would be created in a container using WSFW's system. You can find out more about this system here.
UsageRequirements: Sim Settlements 2 has a complex conditioning system that can be used throughout it. If this is set, this item will only be produced if all of the conditions configured on the UsageRequirements object are true. This could do things like lock production of a certain bonus item behind a quest, or only if a certain person is assigned to the plot, or only if certain other plots exist in the settlement, etc. To make use of this, find an appropriate SS2_UsageRequirements object, or create your own by duplicating the SS2_Template_UsageRequirements form - all of which can be found under Items > MiscItem.
iOccupantCount: This is a special field for building plans that support multiple settlers. By setting this value in an entry, you can create additional costs that are only consumed when this many or more settlers are assigned to the plot.
Note that ALL production and operating costs are multiplied by the number of occupants. So only use this to create extra costs on top of that.
We multiply all production, consumption, and settlement resources provided by plots by the number of settlers to ensure that the balance is always tied to the number of people. This allows you as the building designer to have tons of creative freedom, without having to worry about balance.
Item: This wasn't skipped, but we're going to discuss non-ActorValues you can use: Keywords, FormLists, and Inventory Items (ie. weapons, chems, ammo, etc). For all of these types, the items are consumed either from the settlement Workbench, Player Inventory, or special container - depending on circumstances.
Consumption Circumstances
By default, operating costs are paid either from the Workshop, or from special containers if the PullOnlyFromContainerKeyword property is set (see below for info on this).
If a plot fails to pay its Operating Costs and is temporarily shutdown, the player will find a special option on the ASAM Sensor menu to pay those costs directly. When this option is selected, the Plot will consume as much as possible from the Workshop (or special containers) and then consume the remaining from the Player's inventory (there is a setting in the options players can set to NEVER pull from their inventory).
Keywords: This is unique to OperatingCosts. When set, the plot will consume iCount worth of items that have this Keyword on them.
FormLists: When set, any item found in the formlist is considered eligible to pay the cost and iCount worth of them will be consumed. Priority for which items will be consumed, likely has to do with the order the items appear in the FormList, though I have not confirmed this.
Inventory Items: When an inventory item is used (ie. any type of item the player can have in their inventory), iCount of that item will be consumed.
NameHolderForm: This should be MiscItem record with the Name field filled out, this will then be used in any reports that displays the operating costs to the player. It is mandatory when using a FormList or Keyword as the Item, but can optionally be used for any Item type as well if you want to override the default object name for some reason.
PullOnlyFromContainerKeyword: Workshop Framework includes a little known system whereby special containers can be created for rerouting workshop item production to those containers automatically. At the time of this writing, no one has made a mod capitalizing on this system, but the idea of this field is that you could arrange for consumption to only occur from containers in this system tagged with this keyword. You can find out more about this system here.
UsageRequirements: Sim Settlements 2 has a complex conditioning system that can be used throughout it. If this is set, this item will only be produced if all of the conditions configured on the UsageRequirements object are true. This could do things like lock an operating cost behind a quest, or only if a certain person is assigned to the plot, or only if certain other plots exist in the settlement, etc. To make use of this, find an appropriate SS2_UsageRequirements object, or create your own by duplicating the SS2_Template_UsageRequirements form - all of which can be found under Items > MiscItem.
The SettlementResources property is often used to provide additional benefits such as Food, Water, Power, Defense, and Happiness boosts. It can also be used to apply additional requirements on to the settlement so that it requires a higher amount of a core resource to operate the plot or maintain happiness.
This can create an indirect cost, as those resources tend to have a cost in the form of manpower on plots to operate them, or if Maintenance costs are enabled, actual daily resources.
Earlier in this guide, we discussed the idea of a Brahmin plot producing fertilizer and meat, perhaps the costs could be non-traditional and simply add a higher Water requirement, implying the Brahmin are drinking more water, or perhaps a higher Defense requirement as a good source of meat would be a high priority target for would-be Raiders. It's up to you to get creative about how these can be used to balance the production provided.
Below we'll go over how to fill out this field, with an eye on using it to create indirect costs. We're going to go a little out of order as we first need to establish eligible values for this field.
Workshop Framework actually expands this pool with very unique settings you could impact, be very careful when using these as they can have pretty big impact on the rules the settlement operates. To find them search for WSFW_WorkshopAV.
If you are looking to ADD resources to the settlement, instead of costs, use Food, Safety, Water, SS2_MunicipalPower, and WorkshopRatingBonusHappiness, all with positive numbers.
fAmount: The amount this should be adjusted by, most of the time this will be a positive number, with the exception of WorkshopRatingBonusHappiness which would use a negative number to provide a cost.
iLevel: This works the same as described in every other section. Either enter the level this should go into effect, and create entries for each level (which is generally what we'd do to ensure the impact rises with higher plot levels), or use -1 to apply to all levels.
iOccupantCount: This is a special field for building plans that support multiple settlers. By setting this value in an entry, you can provide additional changes to settlement resources that are only used when this many or more settlers are assigned to the plot.
Note that ALL production and operating costs are multiplied by the number of occupants. So only use this to create bonus items.
We multiply all production, consumption, and settlement resources provided by plots by the number of settlers to ensure that the balance is always tied to the number of people. This allows you as the building designer to have tons of creative freedom, without having to worry about balance.
iVirtualResourceHandling: This is a special field currently only used to establish additional virtual storage for Industrial plots. This field may be used to pull off additional things in the future, but for now should be left default.
UsageRequirements: Sim Settlements 2 has a complex conditioning system that can be used throughout it. If this is set, this item will only be produced if all of the conditions configured on the UsageRequirements object are true. This could do things like lock an resource impact behind a quest, or only if a certain person is assigned to the plot, or only if certain other plots exist in the settlement, etc. To make use of this, find an appropriate SS2_UsageRequirements object, or create your own by duplicating the SS2_Template_UsageRequirements form - all of which can be found under Items > MiscItem.
While this entire document has discussed things from the perspective of Industrial, any building plan can make use of these fields, regardless of Plot Type or Class. I always prefer to code systems as open as possible to allow for maximum creative freedom for addon authors.
Repeating what I mentioned earlier about breaking from the typical Conversion/Production pattern, just be mindful of player expectation. If you veer too far from what the player expects, you make it harder for them to predict how the mod is going to play, which can lead to confusion and frustration.
Ideally, when breaking from the normal patterns, it should either feel fairly intuitive (for example a Brahmin Agricultural plot providing Milk), or at least be explained in your in-game building plan description so players can learn why your plot is doing something unexpected.
You should also keep balance in mind, if the benefits you're providing far outweigh other buildings, some players will choose to only use yours, but most players will choose not to use yours at all - and may even not use your add-on if they think you don't care about balance.
Throughout this document, I've spoken of designer freedom, I give you all as many tools and freedoms as I can to flex your creativity. Ultimately though, the players get final control.
In the holotape/MCM options, you'll find several references to Building Plan specific settings, such as Building Plan Costs. The player can opt to turn off Building Plan defined changes under the Resources section and instead only allow the Building Class settings to be used.
This ensures players who don't enjoy having to learn all the ins and outs of every building plan can have a predictable experience if they so choose. Telling you about this is not meant to discourage you from making customizations to your plans, but to inform you so you can provide an option to players who may not know about it and who complain about your decisions, and also to reinforce the importance of keeping balance in mind - as ideally we don't want players to shut these building level customizations off or they lose a lot of flavor and fun.