¶ Tutorials for City Plan Building
If you are new to city plan building, here are some resources that can help you learn how to make your first city plans!
Intro to City Plan Creation
Here is a helpful page explaining the basics of creating a city plan. - Intro to City Plan Creation
Learn to Create City Plans
Step by step instructions about building city plans. - Learn to Create City Plans
Advanced City Planning
Here is a very detailed page about advanced city planning. - Advanced City Plan Info
Level Design
See the guidelines used by the Sim Settlements 2 Dev Team - City Level Guidelines
City Plan Maker Web Tool Guide
For a guide to use the City Plan Maker Web Tool, please see: City Plan Maker Web Tool
¶ Common Issues
Q. I don't see the Manage option on the Workbench.
A. You can also access this menu with the MCM menu for Workshop Framework, or if you aren't using MCM in the Workshop Framework Controls holotape, which can be crafted at a Chemistry bench. The menu in either place is under Tools > Manage Settlement Menu.
Q. I don't have an Export Layout option on the Manage menu.
A. The Export option requires that you are using F4SE. Here's an incredibly simple tutorial on installing it.
Q. The export completed, but the file doesn't exist.
A. Confirm you have Papyrus logging enabled. Here's a simple guide to do so.
Q. I'm testing my City Plan but it won't show up in the list.
A. Give Sim Settlements 2 a few minutes to detect your new plan before accessing the menu. If it still doesn't show up, go to the Mods screen off of the main menu, then go to the Load Order screen and confirm your plugin is listed with a checkmark next to it.
¶ Basic Mod List for City Planners
You can only build with items from the following places: Sim Settlements 2, vanilla game objects, DLC objects, and objects from the mod Wasteland Reconstruction Kit. If you use other workshop item mods, players will likely end up with a lot of missing items when using your plan, as people using City Plans generally don't want to install a bunch of extra mods. Fortunately, the Wasteland Reconstruction Kit has over 10,000 items to build with!
Large load orders can lead to instability, and you definitely don't want save corruption after putting in tons of work on a settlement design!
¶ Scrap Mods or Settlement Altering Mods
When Scrap Mods, Mods Listed below or Non-Standard Settlements (Mod added Locations for Settlements) are used when creating a City Plan, you will need to create Scrap Profiles.
Scrap Everything or any other unlisted scrapping mods (including Spring Cleaning) - These mods will allow you to scrap much more than is possible for Sim Settlements to handle reliably. If a mod lets you scrap something extra, you probably shouldn't use it.
All Settlements Extended & Annex the Commonwealth - Mods that increase the build area aren't necessarily a problem technically, like scrap mods are. However, if anyone using your City Plan doesn't have a border extending mod installed, the settlers who are assigned to items outside the vanilla build area will never be able to reach them.
These mods clean settlements without breaking precombines:
- Raze My Settlement
- Clean My Settlement
¶ Scrap Profiles
The Sim Settlements Team has already created Scrap Profiles for the vanilla game locations. (These include if Place Everywhere is used in enhanced selection mode.)
You will only need to create Scrap Profiles if you are creating a City Plan for a custom mod-added settlement or if you have used the mods listed above.
There are two Scrap Profiles that may be required:
These Scrap Profiles will need to be included when you make your City Plan mod.
¶ Mod-Added Locations
When creating your City Plan Mod for a mod added location, it is best practice to add that settlement mod as a master file for your City Plan Mod.
This will make the mod added location mod a requirement for your mod, thus ensuring that players will install the mod added location for your City Plan.
Here is a video with instructions on how to do that using F04Edit:
How to make mods required for your City Plan by Yagisan (YagisanVids)
¶ Using Workshop Framework (WSFW)
You will be using WSFW to export each of your City Plan Levels to make a WSFW.log file to use with the City Plan Plugin Creator to create your City Plan mod file.
This webtool: Settlement Layout Plugin Creator will allow you to convert your export into a WSFW settlement layout plugin that can be imported via Workshop Framework. You can think of a WSFW settlement layout as a single level city plan that does not require SS2.
You may find it useful to only import a single level of your City Plan to test the export file to see if everything was exported correctly. You can use WSFW Import to bring that export into your game for testing.