Happytown: The happiest little town you ever did see (Challenge build)

[ousire]

Hey everyone. I was getting bored of the game after having a lot of my colonies fall into the same pattern: Start game, find where the steam vents are, build small houses, and then burrow into the nearest defensible mountainside like a bunch of dwarves. So, to mix things, up, I decided to try a challenge: To try and make an entirely outside, house based town. Instead of focusing purely on efficiency and defense, the goal of this new colony was to make it aesthetically pleasing, and to try and make my colonists as happy as possible. To complete these goals easier, I'll be playing on Phoebe Friendly.


Meet the beginnings of Happytown. What's one of the most important things to make sure your town is happy? The pub obviously! You'll have to use your imagination for the booze, but this is the humble beginnings of my town. The main room is for our colonists to enjoy food, the smaller back room is the kitchen, where the cooking and butchery tables are located. The green stockpile is for raw foods, the smaller blue stockpile is for raw meats, which are stored in a separate refrigerator room. In the back is the large red dumping stockpile. The rooms at the pub are tiny and dark, but these are only temporary housing. Soon my founding 3 will have proper homes


And we have some friends! The town is still just the founding three staying in the pub rooms, but two wandering travelers were found and quickly captured. No prison was constructed yet, so they temporarily live in the dining room. Sadly, I discovered this means haulers will not haul the rocks away, and colonists cannot eat in there. You can see hints of future expansions in progress around to the sides as well. Off to the right is the town hall, and to the left is a hint of one of our first houses. All of the floor tiles you can see are the start of the main road, which will be stone tiles.


Our first shop! Obviously in a proper town, goods are produced in shops, and where else would these shops be except for in the heart of town? This is the stone cutter's shop, with a small stockpile to store raw stones and cut bricks to construct the roads. Next door is our first house, tucked into the open corner. I want each house to be relatively unique, so they'll be placed in odd locations or have different sizes and decorations.


Expansion was needed rapidly however. The room to the south will be dedicated to holding raw rocks, while the stockpile in the shop itself will be just for bricks. To the left, Romero is constructing a new home for our growing population!


The gun shop! This was intended to be our main stockpile of weaponry, where excess guns go. Weapon racks were the storage counters, and the stone cutter table is the counter top (Use your imagination). Eventually, I DO change this into a new building, but this was my first run of the area. And as you can see, the roads are finally being put into place!


Woah! Lots of stuff happening here! The stonecutter's shop is off to the right, where a bed was added for the crafter to sleep in. But the main focus of this picture is all the new houses! This is the main housing wing of the town for now, and you can see four houses added in the center, and in the middle is some random patches of concrete road, to simulate a back ally that's fallen into a bit of a disrepair. The interior of the houses are all slowly being replaced with concrete. And to the left you can see a portion of the newly added hydroponics farm. The farm plots are further left past it, and are mostly dedicated to strawberries.


This is the garden walk. This is the immediate south east of the rock cutter's shop, that's the structure above the agave plants. More housing is to the sides of the road, and I converted every patch of available fertile ground into growing plots. As you can see, they alternate between all the decorative flowers. The ground to the southeast will be converted into a garden eventually.


The prison! This was built against a cliff face that was hollowed out slightly to make it flat, and then filled with the beds. I elected to make it all one large room so prisoners can talk to each other, to get happiness buffs in addition to the flowers. As you can see, it was originally made from metal walls, but following a fire that almost allowed the prisoners to escape, it was reinforced with stone walls.


And now we finally get to see the town hall, it took me quite a bit to finish even though I started it almost right off the bat. The town hall seemed to be the most obvious place to place the trade comm and beacon, and the research table made its way into there too.  In the front room is the secretary's desk, and in the large dome attached to the back is the mayor's office. I was unfortunately forced to represent desks with walls, due to lack of properly sized tables.


I've dubbed these "The Tears". By this point my town's mined every single exposed metal vein in the map, and even though I have a huge excess of resources I decided to put my miners to work hunting for ore. The entire south side of the map is covered with mountains, and I've dragged out a whole set of long tunnels into the mountain. I'll dig them deeper as I go, and clean out whatever ore I find in the hills.


After collecting so much ore I constructed a set of storage sheds. The building to the north used to be the gun shop. After getting my trade system in place, I gutted it out and replaced it with my main store of batteries for the town. One of the two center buildings is dedicated to resources, and the second is my emergency backup power. After having issues in the past due to power losses, I've learned to do this: Make rooms dedicated to batteries, let them fill, then disconnect them from the grid. If you loose all your power in a shortage, or something like an eclipse happens, you can reconnect them with a single conduit to add their extra power to keep you coasting along.


To finish things off here's the current town roster, so you can see my colonists and their skill distribution. I like to enable every skill on every colonist, just to make sure they idle as least as possible, and firefighting is always high priority; After that though, I just assign skills based on what the character's passions and skills are based on, or what I currently have a need for. I always try to have at least one person dedicated to every skill so jobs will always get done though.

This was just after a psychic wave hit the town and a herd of muffalo attacked. 2 brave colonists lost their lives in the defense of the town, and 5 were incapacitated. As you can see in the top right, the muffalo meat is rolling in like mad after killing so many of them. This was the first major loss of the town, so I decided to call a break for the day. I hope you guys enjoy the adventures of happytown and join me next time as I continue to expand and decorate the town!

[a89a89]

This is pretty good

[devin25486]

 Wow... you put almost as much time into actually just writing the msg that actually playing the game XDDD But, I think I can one up you on aesthetics that still are really efficient... (I'm kinda OCD so I need to make my colony like this... you just don't understand XDDD) Well here's a pic...

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[froncek24]

Wow... you put almost as much time into actually just writing the msg that actually playing the game XDDD But, I think I can one up you on aesthetics that still are really efficient... (I'm kinda OCD so I need to make my colony like this... you just don't understand XDDD) Well here's a pic...

Lol I know what you're talking about, I'm also a little bit OCD, so I have symmetry here and there too

[Harlequin]

This was really interesting to see and read. Lots of cool ideas here!
I made an entirely outside Homestead on Randy, built a stone wall around it.
EVERYONE DIED.
It looked and felt awesome though, twice as much fun as burrowing!

[StorymasterQ]

Stone wall, huh? Must've been a case of Rocks Fall Everyone Dies. That sounds like Randy's work.

[123nick]

you should use a furniture mod to have more furniture that way we wont have to use our imagination, try mods like wood economy or e-furniture. there was this one mod that adds bar stools and a pool table, good for bars.