How Buildings Grow With Your Village
Building Upgrades
As your village grows, so should the buildings that define it. A static settlement quickly becomes a stagnant one and that’s something we want to avoid entirely. Our goal is to create a system where every building evolves over time, adapting to your priorities, your playstyle, and the unique story of your settlement.
Whether it’s a humble workplace, a family home, or a social hub, every structure in the game is designed to offer meaningful progression through upgrades. These upgrades allow you to specialize, optimize, or even completely reshape how a building contributes to your village.
A Clearer Upgrade System
In earlier prototypes, we experimented with a wide variety of upgrade paths for example, in our Lumberjack Camp. While flexible, this approach quickly became complex and difficult to manage.
To improve clarity and usability, we’ve streamlined building progression into four primary upgrade categories:
Efficiency
Efficiency upgrades directly improve worker performance. This includes flat bonuses to productivity as well as the introduction of new workstations, enabling multiple villagers to work in parallel.
This category is all about doing more with the same workforce and doing it faster.
Workplace Size
Some upgrades focus on expansion rather than optimization. Workplace Size upgrades allow buildings to employ additional workers, increasing total output capacity.
Perfect for scaling production when demand rises.
Morale
We’re introducing Worker Morale as a new component of village happiness. Each workplace now contributes to (or detracts from) overall satisfaction.
Morale upgrades improve working conditions and increase worker happiness leading to a more stable and potentially more productive workforce.
Production Line Changes
This is the most flexible and impactful upgrade category.
Production Line Changes can:
- Enhance existing production (e.g. increased output)
- Add byproducts or catalysts
- Unlock entirely new production chains
These upgrades allow buildings to fundamentally change their role within your economy.
Custom Upgrades
In addition to the core categories, there are also specialized upgrades tailored to specific buildings. These are unique cases that don’t fit neatly into the main system and are implemented individually to support more distinctive gameplay features.
We designed the upgrade system as a flexible middle ground between automation and player control, avoiding both overwhelming micromanagement and a lack of meaningful influence. Some buildings handle upgrades automatically while others remain player-directed, and this behavior can be adjusted freely to match different playstyles. Behind the scenes, an intelligent system ensures that automated decisions are purposeful and aligned with overall efficiency, rather than random.
Looking Ahead
This upgrade system is a core pillar of how your village will grow and specialize over time. Whether you prefer hands-on control or high-level management, the system is designed to support both playstyles without compromising depth.
In a future post, we’ll take a closer look at workstations and their role within production cycles.
