Town & village maps

Most Map Foundry kinds draw a landscape — a coastline, a mountain range, a river valley. Settlement draws a place: districts, streets, walls, individual buildings, the fields that feed it and the wharves it trades from.

The terrain is still generated underneath, and the town lays itself around it. It will bridge a river, bend a lane around a bluff, wall its landward side and meet the water with a quay.

In the Build tab, set Map kind to Settlement.
Pick a Character — what the place is for. This is the one control that moves everything else.
Adjust anything underneath it. Every setting the character chose is still yours to override.

Character: what kind of place it is

A farming village and an imperial capital are not the same town at two sizes. The character decides which quarters exist, what gets built in them, whether there is a wall and what kind, how much is planted, and what lies outside.

Character	What you get
Farming village	Barns and byres among the houses, a green rather than a market square, open fields all round, and almost never a wall
Market town	A charter, a square, roads that meet. Everything present, nothing dominant
Mining camp	Craft and cramped housing, no gardens, no fields — it is here because the ore is
Mill town	Yards, races and packed terraces along the water
Port	Docks, warehouses and a working waterfront. It buys its grain, so no fields
Caravan stop	A serai, stock pens and water. A palisade at most
Fortress	A garrison that acquired a town. Walled whatever its size, dense inside, fields belong to someone else
Temple town	A precinct at the centre, lodgings for pilgrims, courts and groves
University town	Colleges on the best sites, and gardens because the colleges have them
Imperial capital	Palaces, precincts and a parade ground. No farmland inside the walls — the ground is far too valuable

Picking a character also sets a sensible vernacular, street layout and wall for that kind of place. Change any of them afterwards and the character stays as it is — a steppe capital or a timber port is a perfectly good map.

Vernacular: what it is built of

Not a colour scheme. The vernacular decides plot shape, how big a block is, how wide a street is, whether rooms wrap a courtyard, and how much of the plan looks set out rather than grown.

Medieval — narrow deep plots with shared walls, steep gables, tangled lanes
Timber — generous plots with yards, steep roofs, room between the houses
Adobe — flat roofs, courtyards, the tightest alleys in the set
Stone-cut — deep halls driven back from a narrow lane, nothing left unbuilt
Classical — a strict grid of large insulae, wide paved streets
Imperial — boulevards and palatial courts, drawn once by someone who could compel it
Colonial — a surveyed grid with detached houses and room left to grow
Eastern — walled compounds around courts, gathered into tiled wards
Lagoon — packed and tall, with the channels as the through routes
Stilt — huts on platforms joined by walkways, water in the gaps
Steppe — round tents around open ground

Street layout

Organic — grown, and it shows
Grid — set out square to the town’s own long axis
Linear — one street with the town along it, which is what a road village is
Terraced — streets run level along the slope and the cross-lanes climb
Axial — boulevards driven straight through the middle
Radial — spokes and rings from the market

Around the town

Open fields, quays, weir and mill and suburbs each follow the character by default, and each can be forced on or off.

The defaults are deliberate: a fortress does not farm, a port buys its grain, a caravan stop has no suburbs. Override them when your story says otherwise — a fortress under siege growing its own food is exactly what these are for.

Some features need the ground to cooperate. A weir needs a river wide enough to be worth damming; quays need a shore or a navigable channel. Setting them to Always asks for them where they are possible, not everywhere.

Walls

Whether a town is walled depends on what it is, not just how big it is — walling a place needs a charter, a garrison and a reason. A fortress is walled at any size; a mill town usually is not at any size.

Wall extent controls how much of the circuit was actually built. Below full, the town walls the stretches worth the money and leaves the rest open, which is what a place that ran out of funds — or only ever walled its landward side — actually looks like.

A wall never runs across open water. Where the town meets the sea, the water is the defence and you get a quay instead.

Roofs

Roof material is normally Mixed, drawing on whatever the tradition uses — a medieval town is thatch with tile and slate through it. Force a single material for a planned settlement where everything went up at once.

Size, and what it costs

Hamlet through Metropolis changes how much ground the map covers and how much is built on it. A warning appears in the panel if you pick a size and resolution where the streets would not be legible — worth heeding, because the alternative is discovering it at export.

Rerolling part of a town

You will often like a town except for one bit of it. Changing the seed gives you a different town entirely — so instead, use Reroll to ask for a different answer in just that spot.

Pick a scope, then click the map:

Block lays out one block again — its plots, its buildings, and any trees standing where the new buildings go.
Quarter lays out a whole district again and gives it a new name.

Everything else stays exactly as it was. The streets do not move, the other quarters keep their names, and the rest of the buildings are untouched.

Click the same spot again and you get a third arrangement, not the first one back — so you can keep asking until you like the answer. Undo steps back through the versions you saw, and Reset all returns the town to how it generated.

The map redraws about a second after each click. A town edit is not a sticker placed on a finished picture — the town is genuinely laid out again knowing about it — so there is a short pause while it rebuilds.

If you click somewhere with no block — open ground, the market square, water — nothing happens. That is not an error; there was simply nothing there to lay out again.

Rerolls are saved with the map, so re-opening it from My Maps brings back the town you settled on rather than the one it first generated.

Renaming quarters, streets and buildings

Turn on Select & rename under Edit the town, then click a quarter, a named street or a notable building on the map to select it and double-click to type a new name. The name is yours from then on — it survives rerolling other parts of the town, and it comes across when you save the map to a scene.

Only the named streets are selectable. A town has well over a hundred lanes and most are never captioned, so the map offers the ones worth naming rather than all of them.

The town tools take turns. Turning one on turns the others off, so a click on the map only ever does the one thing you asked for, and turning the active one off hands the map back to panning and zooming.

Moving the market square

Move the square puts the market wherever you want it: turn it on and click a block. Whatever stood on that block makes way — a square is open paved ground, so nothing is built in it.

The generated square is a good guess, not a decision. The map looks for the largest market block near the middle of town, which is usually where a market grew; when it guesses wrong, this is how you say so.

Moving a notable building

Select a notable building with Select & rename, then turn on Move a building and click a block to move it there. The tool stays greyed out until you have selected one, because it moves the building you picked.

It moves within the same quarter. A notable is what it is because of the quarter it stands in — the temple quarter has the temple, the docks have the warehouse — so moving one across town would not carry the building with it, it would swap it for whatever the new quarter builds. If you want a temple somewhere else, reshape the quarter or name a building there instead.

The building lands on a sensible plot on the block you chose, fronting a street, rather than exactly where you clicked. It is a building, and buildings stand on streets.

Naming a building

Not every building on a town map is somewhere — most are just houses. Name a building turns one into a place: click any building and it gets a name, and it becomes a pin when you save the map to a scene.

If you have somewhere particular in mind, name it yourself; otherwise the map picks a name that suits what the building is. A temple gets named like a temple, an ordinary house gets a house’s name.

Painting your own districts

You do not have to accept the generated quarters. In the Paint tab, the urban brushes (residential, craft, market, noble, docks, temple, farmland, park, plaza, town wall) let you place districts by hand, and the layout engine builds into whatever you paint.

Saving to a scene

Districts become labelled regions, main streets become labelled paths, and notable buildings — the guildhall, the temple, the inn — become scene pins that can pick up entity and wiki stubs like any settlement.

Ordinary houses do not become objects. A town has thousands of them and none of them wants to be clickable.