Buildings
Buildings in Foundation are a necessity to growing the village. When starting a new game, the initial buildings, (specifically the village center and builder's workshop) are forced by making them the only buildings available to construct. After these first initial placements, the building tree will open up, with quests that guide further construction towards specific buildings.
Construction of any building begins by opening the building menu:
Inactive Icon
Hover Icon
Selected Icon
From the menu, there are two methods of finding the desired building: the Search box in the top right, or the building type filters at the bottom of the menu.
- All
- Logistics
- Resource Production
- Food Production
- Goods Production
- Service
- Administration
- Decoration
- Masterpiece
- Transportation
- Wall
- ModsBuilding Placement
Once the building to be placed has been located and selected in the build menu, a blueprint will show in the world under the cursor. The blueprint has 4 key parts:
- Building visual - Shows the position and angle of the building when placed
- Blue line - The outer boundary
- Green arrows on the boundary - Access points, blocking these will prevent villagers from entering the building
- Central arrows - Indicates the current placement activity. The default activity is move/place (arrows pointing in four directions), however, when the CTRL key is held this will change the movement mode to rotate on the Y-axis.
At the early stages of city building, the rotate and place commands will be all that is required in most situations, alongside right click (or ESC) to cancel/delete the selected part. There are two further controls to be aware of:
- Shift + Left Click - Allows the building/part to be placed, but retain the blueprint to place again. This allows for the rapid deployment of multiple buildings/parts of the same time without having to individually reselect them
- Left Click + Drag on Vertical Arrows - This allows for the resizing of building parts. Only modular buildings are able to have their parts resized.
Modular Buildings
Modular buildings can be built and adjusted to adapt to needs (or aesthetics) as the village expands. The first two modular buildings are the builder's workshop (which can be extended with a sculptor's workshop) and the market. With exception to quarries and the builder's workshop, modular buildings start by designating a center point to build from. All modular buildings will have one or more mandatory requirements that will prevent the building from being constructed if not provided. For instance, the Rustic Church must have a door, core and bell tower in order to be constructed.
Overview of a Market with multiple pieces installed.
A church core selected showing the resize indicator in the middle of the part.
Decorations
Decorations are standalone objects that improve the desirability of the area in which they are placed. Decorations can be common or Estate-specific.
For more details on decorations, please see the dedicated page.
Resource Bundles
As of version 1.8, construction has the additional requirement of resource bundles: a package of resources that must be completed in order to construct a specific stage of a building. Many early buildings will have a single bundle of all materials required for construction.
More advanced buildings and modular buildings will have multiple bundles to the construction. Although resources may be brought for any bundle as part of the construction, builders can only complete work in bundle order. If bundle 2 is complete, but bundle one is not, building will not be able to begin; similarly is bundles 1 and 3 are completed, but bundle 2 is not, construction will stop on completion of bundle 1.
Where multiple bundles share a resource, resources brought to the site will be allocated in bundle order.
Maintenance Costs
All buildings have a monthly maintenance cost that need to be covered in order to ensure the village can thrive. Not meeting this cost will result in the village haemoraging gold coins, which, in turn will prevent the addition of further buildings and the ability to purcahse new territories.
Beginning a Settlement
Once the initial territory has been selected on the map, the village center must be placed; placing this in the center seems the most logical from an access standpoint early on: all villagers will congregate here while not working so travel to work etc is roughly even. If the resources (berries and stone specifically) are towards the central point, moving the center off the side may be better. Once placed, the initial resources will be supplied:
The second building to place will be the builder's workshop. Strategically at this stage in the game there is no real benefit to placement, unless the plan is to build out in a specific direction. From here the building tree will expand out, giving access to the following buildings:
The objective at stage is to become self sustaining; this means a functioning market selling food and a well for water. Placing a well is sufficient for water, for a functioning market and gathering hut and granary are necessary to gather, then store berries ready for collection by the market.
For the required buildings alone the required resources are:
Wood (30)
Planks (10)
Stone (15)
Gold Coins (90)
As can be noted by comparing the original resources and the required resources, there is adequate wood and coins, but stone and planks are not available. In order to get these two resources a stonecutter camp and a sawmill need to be built. These two buildings alone will require 30 wood, 10 stone, 5 tools, 125 gold; this would then deplete the wood supply so a lumber camp would need to be constructed.
To reduce construction bottlenecks and have a continual supply of goods constructing the lumber and stonecutter camps first, then the gathering hut and well will ensure a flow of base resources and partial villager satisfaction. The market and sawmill can then be built together with the granary placed last.
